#bluebuck

9-1-1 & 9-1-1: Nashville | Blue Bennings/Evan Buckley 3,412 words | Rated E

Post-episode: s01e12 Spirit of the Games | Flirting | Hook-Up | Workplace Sex | Hand Jobs | Blow Jobs | Evan Buckley is not over Tommy Kinard

Bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus)

(Photo in Public Domain)

Extinction Date- 1800

Habitat- Southern Africa

Size (Weight/Length)- 200 kg; 1.6 m

Diet- Grasses

Cool Facts- By the time the bluebuck was scientifically described, it was already on the decline and the Europeans certainly didn’t help. Bluebucks lived in small herds and spent their lives on the move in search of fresh grasses. These antelope are considered the first large African mammal to go extinct in modern times. Changes in environment, such as a rising sea level, and low genetic diversity already put the bluebuck at risk. Europeans then hunted the antelope to extinction for its meat and as museum specimens. Multiple rock paintings depict Bluebuck throughout Africa and were believed to have supernatural potency by Neolithic peoples. Roan and sable antelopes, their closest relatives, still wander Africa today. Sable antelope are critically endangered due to illegal hunting and conservations are rushing to make sure it doesn’t go the way of the bluebuck.

[ The specimen in question, the horns and partial skull of a bluebuck. ]

"The bluebuck or blue antelope was the first large African mammal to go extinct in recent times. Once found living in the grasslands along the southern coast of South Africa, it was driven to extinction by humans in around 1800. While closely related to two surviving antelopes, the sable and roan, the bluebuck was distinct having split from a last common ancestor some 1.5 million years ago. As the name suggests, the bluebuck had a predominantly blue-grey coat that faded to a whitish colour on its belly. On its head it had white patches in front of its eyes, and a pair of large, ridged horns that swept back in an elegant curve. While these horns were typically smaller than those found on its relatives, they still reached a respectable length of about 50 centimetres. But the likely scarcity of the bluebuck by the time Europeans first encountered it, and the speed at which it was made extinct, means that there are astonishingly few specimens of this antelope in museums around the world. Now a new study has used genetics to confirm that a pair of horns in the Natural History Museum’s collection is from the unfortunate species, bringing the total number of confirmed bluebuck specimens globally to five."