Creature Feature: Bongo.

Actually, those antelope in the trailer were kind of cool-looking. What were they, anyways?

Source: Allposters.com

Well, you're going to laugh. It's called a "bongo." Yes, like the drums. If you can't look at that without cracking up, its scientific name is Tragelaphus eurycerus. It is a nocturnal browser native to many parts of Africa, including Congo, Ghana, and Kenya. Kenya has a very small, unique subspecies of bongo that will come up again later.


Two things stand out about the bongo immediately: that coat and those horns. As in most animals with attractive pelts, the stripes are camouflage. The red pigment rubs off easily - so easily, it is said, that rain running off a bongo's back is stained red. Certainly a neat image, even if it is not true.

The horns are perhaps the bongo's most outstanding feature. Although looking somewhat similar to those of the eland, bongo horns twist only once and take on a sort of lyre shape. The bongo is actually one of the few species of antelope in which both sexes have rather decorative, spiraling horns. They are still larger in the male, but awesome nonetheless. Better yet, they are both functional and fashionable; a bongo's horns keep it from being caught in vegetation while running.

Oddly, there seems to be a lot of convergent evolution with the okapi going on. Both the okapi and bongo love salt licks. They also have long tongues to handle those licks. On a visual level, they are both red-brown with stripes. There was even an odd delay in discovery by Westerners. They aren't related - okapi are the only extant relatives of the giraffe while antelope are closer to cattle - but they sure evolved a lot of things in common.

As one might expect, some populations of bongo are endangered. The more common, western/lowland bongo is listed as near-threatened. Only the Eastern/mountain bongo from Kenya is in critical condition, with possibly fewer than 100 left in the wild. The usual suspects - poaching and eating - are at work. As if to put salt on the wound, bongo also have a high risk of goitre, i.e. they die from malfunctioning thyroid. Habitat destruction is another big factor in almost every endangered species. This one is no exception. Although  an interesting species of antelope,bonoshould probably be avoided in post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Creature Feature: Giant Eland.

Nature shows focus too much on big preds, blah blah blah. Seriously, film crews have to spend hours getting those successful hunts on film.  More often than not, the herbivore survives. Predators kill off the weak, very young, or sick. That way both species stay healthy as a whole.

With that in mind, there are some herbivores that are pretty impressive to look at, even without a lion chasing them. The giant eland (Taurotragus derbianus) is one of them. It is native to central and western Africa. Like most antelope, it's an herbivore. What, did you think it had the potential to eat you, too?

The giant eland is impressive on a number of levels. It's fast, capable of reaching speeds of up to 43 mph. A height of almost 6 feet at the shoulder makes it the largest antelope in the world. The babies grow fast. Also, those horns look pretty darn awesome. (Luckily, they're also pretty docile.)

Badass, even when chillin'.

Both sexes of eland have twisting, V-shaped horns. The bulls lock them during courtship, as might be expected. They are also useful for knocking down branches. You will never forget those horns after seeing them once Many antelope have nice headgear, but the eland has to be at least in the top 5 when it comes to having awesome horns.

Despite being listed as "least concern," the giant eland is increasingly threatened by human hunting. This is just not for a very impressive trophy head; the meat of the eland is also packed with nutrition. The milk of an eland also contains twice the protein and three times the content of regular cow milk. They also require a lot less water than cattle. Luckily, there have been quite a few instances of domestic giant elands, so they should be around no matter how desperate Africa gets. Then again...behold the fate of the aurochs:

Shoot.

Creature Feature: Wildebeest.

Ah, antelope. The mere word antelope conjures images of wild, open areas and elegant, deerlike animals. Home, home on the range and all that. Screw wolves, antelope should be the ones being called "majestic." Google Image a Thompson's gazelle, one of the most popular prey species for lions on nature documentaries. Look at those horns, that leap, that...

...wait a sec, what the EFF is that?!

That, dear friends, is a wildebeest (Connochaetes). You might know it a little better as the gnu. There are two species: the blue wildebeest (C. gnou)and the black wildebeest (C. gnou). Both of them are equally weird and native to Africa. They are among the least charismatic mammals on that continent. Granted, the blue wildebeest is still on the Serengeti, so the 'beest gets some screentime from that alone.

The wildebeest is probably the least enchanting of the antelope living on the African savannah. They look more like oxen than antelope, what with their wide faces, curved horns, and bulky builds. They have squarish pupils like goats, eyes that range from brown to deep red, and have faces that are slender rectangles as opposed to any other shape.  In other words, they're probably the best visible proof that antelope are, in fact, more closely related to cattle than to deer. Even cows don't have spinal ridges like that. The short 'mane' and hump call to mind the 'bad guy' of the savannah, the hyena. Yes, we're still talking about an herbivore.

This one just looks BADASS.

Wildebeest have exactly two presentations in popular culture: As food or as something utterly terrifying. Most of us probably first learned of wildebeest from The Lion King, in which - spoiler alert - a stampede of red-eyed, horned faces tramples poor Simba's father. I can see a number of reasons for them to pick wildebeest as opposed to some other ungulate, but the one that sticks out the most is that wildebeest and those hyenas both have a menacing, brutish hump that just makes them look evil. They're even colored similarly. Even though wildebeest themselves are completely benign, they can easily be sold as the most menacing antelope ever.

Interestingly, the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King may have been based off of an actual event.  Every year, massive herds of wildebeest and zebra migrate away from the Serengeti, the most filmed place on the planet. (Note how, even in the movie about this epic migration, the wildebeest are slated as prey for a cheetah- not that it isn't realistic.) Scientists think that this is due to the availability of surface water. They have also observed a sort of collective intelligence among the migrating herd - a hive mind that makes them conquer the obstacles on their path as one. (Humans seem to have the opposite mentality, acting more like idiots when in a group.) Horns, check; sinister eyes, check; evil hunch, check; hive mind, check.

Have a black wildebeest. Black makes EVERYTHING more evil!

The wildebeest is so famously monsterlike that ancient people actually made a monster out of it. Going back as far as ancient Greece, the wilderbeest of Ethiopia (itself kinda legendary) was mutated into the legendary catoblepas- a monster with the head of a boar and the body of a buffalo. It was forever doomed to look downward thanks to its heavy head. Pliny the Elder thought that the catoblepas's down-turned head was a rather fortunate adaptation, given that anything that made eye contact with it turned to stone. Another Roman historian disagreed about the beast's infamous stone gaze, but gave it toxic breath as compensation. Either way, the wildebeest, a real animal, was suddenly on par with the infamous basilisk. The main differences: catoblepas had the decency to keep its head down and could run you over if its breath and gaze did not do the job. Wildebeest have no such superpowers, but they are weird-looking enough to make one wonder.

And if they do have superpowers? There is no benevolent deity out there. Period. They already killed Mufasa unintentionally. We're next. 

Creature Feature: Tibetan Antelope.

Nobody likes talking about Tibet. Everybody's mad that they'll piss off China by doing so, so a lot of notions to free Tibet are swept under the rug. Shame; it's an interesting place, geologically. It's got a lot of water, strangely enough, and a bunch of unique fauna to boot.



Aside from the Dalai Lama, high altitudes, and a lot of rivers for a place that's practically a desert, Tibet also has this cute little fellow. He is simply called a Tibetan antelope or chiru (Pantholops hodgsonii). Tibetan antelopes eat what little vegetation there is, leading to many conflicts with local herders and humans.

These antelope are small. They get roughly a meter at shoulder height. The males are slightly bigger, sport horns, and have black striping on their legs. Overall, if one was going to pick an antelope to keep, these seem like an OK choice. Only the dik-dik could possibly be cuter.

The chiru is said to be one of the closest antelope to goats. It looks more goatlike than most antelope (people who are NOT heavily into artiodactyls will probably notice something a little wrong) and molecular evidence supports putting it into its own genus, if not subfamily.  Its closest relative lived during the Pleistocene in Tibet, so this little guy is almost a living fossil. Almost.

 

Tibetan antelope are highly endangered. The indigenous peoples  of Tibet use the antelopes' wool for something called shahtoosh. It might ring a bell; the wool is often smuggled through Nepal into Kashmir and India. Although the wool can be harvested without killing the adorable little antelope, many natives do it anyways. The antelope now live primarily on a single nature reserve, which is protected such that domestic animals and humans cannot use the antelopes' land.