Okapi - History

History

The okapi was known to the ancient Egyptians, an ancient carved image of the animal was discovered in Egypt. Although the okapi was unknown to the Western world until the 20th century, it has been possibly depicted since the early 5th century BCE, on the façade of the Apadana, at Persepolis, as a gift from the Ethiopian procession to the Achaemenid kingdom.

For years, Europeans in Africa had heard of an animal that they came to call the 'African unicorn'. In his travelogue of exploring the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley mentioned a kind of donkey that the natives called the 'Atti', which scholars later identified as the okapi. Explorers may have seen the fleeting view of the striped backside as the animal fled through the bushes, leading to speculation that the okapi was some sort of rainforest zebra.

When the British governor of Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, discovered some pygmy inhabitants of the Congo being abducted by a showman for exhibition, he rescued them and promised to return them to their homes. The grateful pygmies fed Johnston's curiosity about the animal mentioned in Stanley's book. Johnston was puzzled by the okapi tracks the natives showed him; while he had expected to be on the trail of some sort of forest-dwelling horse, the tracks were of some cloven-hoofed beast.

Though Johnston did not see an okapi himself, he did manage to obtain pieces of striped skin and eventually a skull. From this skull, the okapi was correctly classified as a relative of the giraffe; in 1901, the species was formally recognized as Okapia johnstoni.

The okapi is sometimes referred to as an example of a living fossil.

The okapi was adopted as an emblem by the now defunct International Society of Cryptozoology.