No Such Thing as an Antelope

There is no such thing as an antelope.

Or at least that's true in the same sense that there's "no such thing as a fish". Which is to say that, obviously, antelopes exist but they aren't a scientifically definable group of animals. Or that, if they were, that group wouldn't map closely to what the regular English word "antelope" is supposed to mean.

The word entered English during the Rennaissance, and descends, via Latin, from the Greek "ανθολοψ". That first appears in the 4th century (so not old enough to be Ancient Greek, as such) and referred at the time to a mythical beast said to live along the Euphrates that had horns so sharp and serrated that it used them to cut down trees. We don't know why the Byzantine Greeks called it this, but there's not some "lope" that it's "ante" to (nor, to use most other European languages, is it an anti-lope); it's just a coincidence that the word sounds that way. For all we know, they were borrowing a word from some other, older language spoken somewhere out east.

It's entirely plausible that the description of the mythic animal was the result of tall travellers' tales referring to an actual antelope of some kind, but that's as much a mystery as the ultimate etymology. In any event, it was only around the 17th century that the word came to be used in English for a real-world creature. 

A century or so later, the first catalogue of scientific names, in 1758, lists five species that we would now consider to be antelopes. While some people describe antelopes as "deer-like", Linnaeus, when he compiled the catalogue, was already aware that they were quite a different sort of creature. This was in part because they had horns, not antlers, and, as I've previously described, the two types of structure are anatomically distinct. Also recognising that they were neither sheep nor cows, he placed them among the goats.

They were first split off by Prussian naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1766, as a result of whom the name Antilope entered the scientific literature. In 1821, as part of a wider work on animal classification, English zoologist John Edward Gray divided the ruminating mammals into six families, naming five of them for the first time (having been beaten to naming the deer family by a single year). One of these was the "antelope family" which he distinguished from the cattle, sheep, and goats on the mistaken impression that their horns had a different internal structure.

Since then, Gray's "antelope family" has been demoted to subfamily rank, placed within the broader cattle family that includes all the true-horned ruminants. Furthermore, most of the species originally placed within it are now classified elsewhere... and this brings us to why antelopes don't exist.

The problem is that the animals we describe as "antelopes" aren't a single type of creature. They're actually multiple different types of animal defined as much by what they are not as by what they are. Effectively, the word "antelope" in English is commonly taken to refer to any member of the cattle family that isn't a cow, goat, or sheep of some kind. And that covers a fair bit of ground.

The modern rule on scientific naming is that all the members of a named group of animals must be more closely related to the other members of that group than they are to anything else. Or, to put it another way, that they must have evolved from a single ancestor that's unique to them. But the spiral-horned antelopes are more closely related to cattle than they are to, say, reedbuck, while oryxes are more closely related to goats than they are to impala. Come to that, the pronghorn "antelope" of North America isn't even a member of the cattle family at all - leading to arguments that it isn't "really" an antelope (which seem rather odd when you consider that, taxonomically speaking, neither is anything else).

A 2019 scheme for division of the cattle family
(Yes, this has changed since the last time I did one...)

Ignoring the pronghorn for the sake of simplicity, anything we can say about antelopes in general is also going to be true of the entire cattle family. They are cloven-hoofed mostly herbivorous mammals with a four-chambered ruminating stomach. They have no incisors or canine teeth in the upper jaw, just a flat bony plate like a chopping board, and the lower canines are indistinguishable from incisors, being used only to clip plants, not to stab into fresh meat. The remaining teeth are separated from these by a wide gap, and are shaped so as to grind up tough vegetable matter. The males have permanent unbranched bony horns covered in a keratinous sheath, although these are usually either absent or at least much smaller in the females.

All of that is equally true of goats, sheep, and cows. But, once we concede that the term "antelope" actually covers multiple different kinds of animal, just how many kinds is that? There is inevitably a degree of subjectivity in this. Still ignoring the pronghorn, the cattle family tree is complex enough that our rule that every member of a group has to be more related to the rest of the group than to anything else means that there must be at least five such groups. In practice, modern scientists generally place non-pronghorn antelopes into more subfamilies than that - but exactly how many that should be is still controversial.

Indeed, one scheme from 2021 has only two subfamilies, something achieved by not giving goats and sheep one of their own. More typically, there are about ten subfamilies within the cattle family, one of which is the caprines, which includes goats, sheep, and muskoxen, but not any antelopes. There is pretty much universal agreement that the bovines are another, including not just the cattle, bison, buffaloes, and yak, but also spiral-horned antelopes and a few others. I have described all of the caprine and bovine species in detail previously on this blog, along with the chiru, which still leaves us with seven kinds of antelope left over.

One of these inevitably includes the animal that Pallas named Antilope all the way back in 1766 and that is the last remnant of Gray's "antelope family" of 1821. It's now a subfamily, the Antilopinae, and excludes the bovine antelopes, the chiru, and the other six groups - impalas, wildebeest, and so on. Despite this, it still has more species than any of the others.

These then, for lack of a better name, are the antilopine antelopes; the ones that are most closely related to the species that got the original scientific name. The antelopes as a whole may not exist, but these, which we could very loosely call "the typical antelopes" do. Even the two-subfamily scheme, which considers all the non-bovine bovids (including sheep and goats) to be "antilopine" recognises this group as a tribe - a named division within the larger subfamily.

There aren't many clear features that distinguish antilopine antelopes from other sorts, beyond the fact that genetic analysis shows that have a common ancestor that the others don't share. They tend to have a slim build and to live in arid or semiarid environments. They have large scent glands in front of their eyes, requiring visible pits in the skull to hold them, and they usually (but not always) have striped or otherwise patterned coats, helping to break up their outline and confuse predators when they run. The larger species have horizontal ridges running around their horns, although this is hardly unique. 

They are found everywhere from South Africa to Tibet, which isn't exactly a small area. Over the course of this year, I will try and take a look at all of them. I will be starting next month, not with Pallas' Antilope, but with some species that are, perhaps, more familiar...

[Photo by Nevit Dilman, from Wikimedia Commons. Cladogram adapted from Chen et al. 2019.]