Oryx back from brink of extinction

VISIT the African Plains exhibit at Dublin Zoo and you will see scimitar horned oryx, a creature classified as ‘extinct’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

In the current edition of Zoo Matters, Sandra Molloy outlines the history of this remarkable animal and the work zoos are doing to return it to the wild.

Oryxs are antelopes, a name derived from ‘anthos’, the Greek for flower, and ‘ops’ an eye; the members of this great browser and grazer family, like their distant relatives the deer and cattle, have big beautiful eyes. The scimitar-horned member of the tribe likes arid semi-desert places. A little over a metre high at the shoulder, it gets its name from the two magnificent horns, over a metre long. Curved backwards like curlew’s bills, they are thin and easily broken. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, the world’s first systematic naturalists, believed in the existence of unicorns. Was the mythical beast merely an oryx which had lost a horn? Unlike unicorns the oryx is not white all over. A brown scarf-like patch extends from the neck down the breast. The black eyes and crescent shaped mouth set off an elongated white visage. A brown pattern on the face resembles a ‘bindi’, the forehead pendant worn by Hindu women.