Okapi

This article is about the former cryptid sometimes known as the "African unicorn". For the supposed one-horned ungulate reported from Central Africa, see African unicorn. For the supposed new species of rhinoceros shot in South Africa in 1820, see African unicorn (rhinoceros).

Okapi Photograph Reconstruction The first complete okapi specimen acquired by Harry Johnston (Public Domain). Johnston's concept of the okapi, based on preserved skins and verbal descriptions (Public Domain). Category Former cryptid Proposed scientific names Other names African unicorn, atti, Congolese giraffe, forest giraffe, kenge, makapi, ndumba, o'api, ó-à-pi, zebra giraffe Country reported Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan First reported 1890 Prominent investigators • Sir Harry Johnston

The okapi (Okapia johnstoni) is a species of giraffid mammal endemic to tropical rainforests in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the only extant species in the genus Okapia. Discovered in 1901, the okapi is considered a former cryptid, as it had been reported by European explorers for a decade before its existence was proven by Harry Johnston: it was also regarded by Bernard Heuvelmans as one of the major zoological discoveries to have come about through an essentially cryptozoological methodology. It is consequently a popular icon or "poster animal" of cryptozoology, being used as a logo by the International Society of Cryptozoology. The okapi continues to be relevant in cryptozoology due to speculation regarding its historic and current range, as some cryptozoologists suggest that other populations could explain ancient artwork of okapi-like animals.

Attestations

The first published reference to the okapi was made by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841 – 1904), who repeatedly traversed the Ituri Rainforest in the north-eastern Congo Basin during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1888–1890. In his narrative of the expedition, In Darkest Africa (1890), Stanley referred in a footnote to an animal called the atti, which the Mbuti people identified with Stanley's donkey.

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The Wambutti knew a donkey and called it "atti." They say that they sometimes catch them in pits. What they can find to eat is a wonder. They eat leaves.

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During conversations with his friend Harry Johnston, Stanley gave more details on the atti not published in his book, such as the fact that it had long ears. He also told Johnston of other unknown animals in the forest, such as the giant forest hog and shaw-le.

Other European explorers of the north-eastern Congo published information on thte animal very shortly after Stanley. The Russo-German explorer Wilhelm Junker, who had learned of such an animal in the Nepoko region before Stanley, in 1878 or 1879, published information on it the following year, in the third volume of his book Reisen in Afrika, 1875-1886 (1891). Junker believed the animal, which he called the makapi, was a giant water chevrotain (Hyemoschus sp.).

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Now also I received a remarkable skin, unfortunately without head or feet, so that I was at first unable to determine the species. In size it resembled that of a dwarf antelope, but differed in its reddish-brown colour with dark hair-tips and white stripes reaching from the neck to the flanks. The animal appears to be confined to a very narrow range, the swampy Ngobbu and Dakko districts, where it is often met in the marshes crouching on its fore-legs. It was known only to a few Zandehs, who called it makapi.

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The German Franz Stuhlmann (1863 – 1928), who explored the Semliki Valley in 1891, came across a piece of striped skin being used as a belt, but he believed it was zebra-skin. However, fellow German Georg Schweinfurth (1836 – 1925) shortly confirmed that the pygmies of the Ituri were familiar with an unknown striped animal. As early as 1897, the Belgian administrators of the Congo Free State received a account of an animal called the ndumbe by the Momvu people, the description of which provided an accurate portrait of the okapi, but the report was not published. M. E. Vincait acquired a strip of okapi skin in 1899, but its importance was not realised.

Sightings

1889

Whether or not Stanley or any of his men saw an atti for themselves is debated. In an interview, Stanley only stated that he "believed that it existed on account of the numerous tracks we found in the wet clay of the forest". According to Ray Lankester (1847 – 1929), during conversations with Stanley, Johnston "[came] to the conclusion that Stanley and his companions occasionally caught sight of the Okapi" during their crossings of the Ituri Forest, a journey which Stanley and his valet William Hoffman made three times. However, according to Stanley, the massive size of his caravan meant that most nearby animals fled long before anyone could catch a glimpse of them, although he did personally see a giant forest hog.

1898

The French explorer Jean-Baptiste Marchand (1863 – 1934) recorded a sighting of an okapi-like animal which he called an "antelope-donkey-giraffe," on 16 June 1898, in the marshes of the Bahr-el-Ghazal, near the Congolese border in what is now South Sudan. The sighting was not published until 1905, by which time the animal's existence had been proven.

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The tirailleurs on guard in the first boat almost immediately reported among the herd of antelopes seen just now, an individual absolutely different from the others, of a shape, coat, and gait quite abnormal for the species and for the region. I do not remember ever having seen anything like it in Africa. I order the flotilla to stop its movement, and, provided with a rifle, I go in a light canoe, by means of which I am trying to get close enough to the strange animal to be able to capture it. I have a hunch that natural history might be interested in the success of my attempt.

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Due to the marshy terrain, Marchand was unable to paddle close enough to capture the animal, but got within around two hundred metres, close enough to carefully observe it through his telescope.

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It is large! Much larger than the others — at least 1 m. 50 at the withers. The colour of the coat, the most striking feature at first sight, is plainly tan red, with white spots on the chest that I do not see well from here. From the general form, were it not for a pair of enormous ears, greyish and gleaming, oddly shaped, and which a little white ago I almost took for the horns of a Kashmiri bighorn sheep, one could believe oneself to be in the presence of the slender equine from the neighbouring region of Abyssinia: the zebra. But by the blunt shape of the muzzle and the head as well as by the presence of two curious little horns or protuberances at the top, it also recalls a little giraffe. To be sure, this variety of antelope — if an antelope it be — is still unknown and not described in the collections of naturalists, and even seems foreign to the herd of antelopes which it accompanies ... It is also more suspicious and more skittish.

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Although the sighting occurred outside of the okapi's currently-known range, the zoologist Auguste Ménégaux (1857 – 1937) was certain that the animal seen must have been an okapi. When he showed Marchand a picture of an okapi, he immediately recognised it as the animal he had seen seven years before.

In popular culture

• Owing to the circumstances of its discovery, the okapi was the official emblem of the International Society of Cryptozoology, and currently appears on the logo of its spiritual successor, the International Cryptozoology Society. The okapi appearing on the logo of the ICZS, designed by Loren Coleman and Duncan Hopkins, is specifically based on a photograph of the first live okapi to be widely seen by Europeans, a month-old individual captured and photographed in 1907 by Antonio-Millo Ribotti at Bambilli, on the Evelle River.