The bluebuck is an extinct species of antelope that lived in South Africa until around 1800. It was sometimes considered a subspecies of the roan antelope, but a genetic study has confirmed it as a distinct species. The largest mounted bluebuck specimen is 119 centimetres tall at the withers.
About Bluebuck in brief
The bluebuck is an extinct species of antelope that lived in South Africa until around 1800. It was sometimes considered a subspecies of the roan antelope, but a genetic study has confirmed it as a distinct species. The largest mounted bluebuck specimen is 119 centimetres tall at the withers. The coat was a uniform bluish-grey, with a pale whitish belly. The bluebuck was confined to the southwestern Cape when encountered by Europeans, but fossil evidence and rock paintings show that it originally had a larger distribution. Hunted by European settlers, the bluebuck became extinct around 1800; it was the first large African mammal to face extinction in historical times, followed by the quagga in 1883. Only four mounted specimens remain, in museums in Leiden, Stockholm, Vienna, and Paris, along with skulls and horns in various museums. The first published mention of the blue buck is from 1681, and few descriptions of the animal were written while it existed. The few 18th-century illustrations appear to have been based on stuffed specimens. In 1846, the Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall moved the blue Buck and its closest relatives to the genus Hippotragus. In 2001, the British ecologist Peter J. Grubb proposed that the ICZN should rescind its suppression of the 1845 naming and make the roAN antelope the type species. This was accepted by the commission in 2003. In 1975, Husson and Holthuis examined the original Dutch version of Kolbe’s book and concluded that the illustration did not depict a bluebuck, but rather a greater kudu and that the error was due to a mistranslation into German.
It has also been pointed out that the animal had already been mentioned on a list of South African mammals in 1681. The next year, Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant made the next illustration of the antelope calling it the goat in his Synant illustration. In 1771, a depiction of a horn from 1764 was published, and included an account of the goat calling it ‘blue goat’ It was also believed that the first published illustration of bluebuck was of a Horned Bluebuck, instead of a goat, and was called the ‘Blue Buck’ in German. In 1969, the Dutch zoologists Antonius M. Husson. and Lipke HolthUis selected it as the lectotype of a syntype series, as Pallas may have based his description on multiple specimens. The type specimen was an adult male skin now in the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in LeIDEN, collected in Swellendam and present in Haarlem before 1776. The skull of a male bluebuck from Leiden was selected in 1969, but it has been questioned whether this was actually the type specimen, but in 1969 it was found to be in a museum in Paris. In 1999, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) accepted the blueuck as the typespecies.
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This page is based on the article Bluebuck published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
