Bubal hartebeest

The bubal and ancient civilizations

The German zoologist Alfred Brehm writes in the 1911 edition of his world-famous zoological reference work Brehms Tierleben: “Of the various species, the one known the longest is the bubal hartebeest, frequently depicted on Egyptian monuments Bubalis buselaphus.” And indeed: the bubal must once have been widespread and must have played an important role for people in antiquity and beyond.

Not only did numerous ancient Greek and Roman historians and scholars—such as Aristotle, Aeschylus, Herodotus, or Pliny the Elder—mention it in their writings, but it is also depicted in Roman frescoes and mosaics. For example, in the Roman mosaics of Hippo Regius, created in the second and fourth centuries AD, an ancient coastal city in present-day Algeria, the bubal is depicted as one of many extinct animals. Even in the Old Testament, the name Yachmur is said to refer to the bubal antelope, and in Deuteronomy, the’o, described as a kosher animal, may allude to the bovid (Bovidae).

Scientists also found horns and skulls of the antelope species at several Egyptian excavation sites; some date from the fourth century AD, others from the early Middle Ages. The ancient Egyptians even had a hieroglyph depicting a newborn hartebeest. Horns of the bubal hartebeest found at a burial site in Abadiyeh, Egypt, lead scientists to believe that the bubal held mythological significance for the Egyptians. In The Doomsday Book of Animals (1981), David Day additionally points to its possible importance as a source of meat. Researchers also believe that people in ancient Egypt domesticated bubal hartebeests and kept them as livestock.

Bubal hartebeest – fact sheet

alternative names	Northern hartebeest, bubal antelope, bubal
scientific names	Alcelaphus buselaphus buselaphus, Alcelaphus buselaphus, Antilope bubalis, Bubalis buselaphus, Bubalis bubastis
original range	North Africa and southern Levant (Morocco to Egypt; Israel/Palestine, Jordan)
time of extinction	unclear, possibly 1925
causes of extinction	hunting, competition with livestock, habitat loss
IUCN status	extinct

Nothing but beautiful memories: Why the bubal went extinct

The bubal hartebeests are “nothing but beautiful memories in the minds of some French occupiers,” wrote David Day in 1981. He was alluding to the French occupation of Algeria between 1830 and 1903. For the French colonial military, it was a pastime and sport at the beginning of the occupation to shoot every single hartebeest they discovered. They wiped out entire herds at once, which is why most authors speak of a massacre.

In Status and Distribution of Moroccan Wild Ungulates (1992), Chris O. Loggers of the United States Forest Service states that the previously widespread populations of bubal hartebeests in Morocco declined enormously fast due to hunting with modern weapons during the 19th century. This likely also applied to the other North African countries where bubal antelopes lived.

While the IUCN cites “overhunting over centuries” as the sole cause of the bubal hartebeest’s disappearance, Hanna Zeckau and Carsten Aermes in Brehms verlorenes Tierleben (2007) additionally mention “habitat destruction.” Many other sources provide no evidence of a link between habitat loss and the disappearance of the bubal antelope, leading to the assumption that hunting of the ungulates was the primary cause of extinction.

A recent study (2025) by evolutionary biologist Uri Wolkowski was able to further substantiate that climatic changes did not contribute to the disappearance of the bubal antelope. Modern ecological models show that the southern Levant remained a climatically suitable habitat until the species’ last recorded occurrence. Nevertheless, the animals there—as later in North Africa—were increasingly pushed into dry marginal areas by human pressure before they disappeared completely. The decline was therefore clearly human-caused: through intensive hunting, competition with livestock, and the loss of undisturbed refugia.

Interestingly, the new study also shows that the extinction of the bubal antelope followed the same pattern across different regions—only with a time lag. In the southern Levant, the animals disappeared as early as the early Middle Ages, while the last North African populations collapsed only in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The pattern is nearly identical; only the timing differs: the early Middle Ages in the east, colonial-era overhunting in the west. In both cases, only small relict populations in marginal areas survived in the end.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the bubal hartebeest survived only in the southern mountain regions of Algeria and in the south of Morocco in the High Atlas, the highest mountain range of the Atlas Mountains in northwestern Africa. The enormous herds still found north of the Atlas Mountains in 1738 had vanished, and the animals still living in the mountains in southern Tunisia on the border with Algeria in 1870 were also gone, wrote the American naturalist Francis Harper in 1954 in Extinct and Vanishing Mammals of the Old World.

Range larger than previously assumed

It is clear that the historical range of the bubal hartebeest shrank over time. But where exactly did it live?

The bubal hartebeest originally occurred in Africa north of the Sahara from Morocco to Egypt. It was found in Algeria, in southern Tunisia, in Libya, Palestine, and Arabia. The northern boundary of its range was the Mediterranean coast. However, the exact range was previously unclear, as excavations yielded remains of the species not only in Egypt but also in the Middle East, particularly in Israel and Jordan.

Genetic analyses were able to solve this puzzle in 2025. Wolkowski and his team sequenced ancient bones found in Israel (c. 540 AD)—with an unambiguous result: they unquestionably belong to the bubal. This confirms that the bubal was not restricted to northwestern Africa but that its range actually extended into the southern Levant—the region east of the Mediterranean comprising Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and southern Lebanon. Its historical range was therefore larger than long assumed.

When did the bubal go extinct?

When the last wild bubal hartebeest died is disputed. Harper states that the last animal in Tunisia was killed in 1902. The last known herd of only 15 animals was located in 1917 near the small Moroccan town of Outat El Haj; however, all but three individuals were killed by a single hunter. In the region around Missour in eastern Morocco, the last bubal hartebeest died in 1925. This animal is frequently considered in the literature to be the last individual of the species overall.

Some sources cite even later extinction dates. Jean B. Panouse mentions in Les Mammiferes du Maroc (1957) that a herd of hartebeests was reportedly seen near the Zguid oasis in Morocco as late as 1945. Panouse himself doubts this sighting, however, as bubal hartebeests would inhabit mountains and hills, while the location in question is a plain between the M’Hamid oasis and the stony desert Hammada du Dra.

The German zoologist Theodor Haltenorth writes in 1980 in A Field Guide to the Mammals of Africa, including Madagascar that hartebeests supposedly lived in Río de Oro until 1950, a province of the former Spanish colony of Spanish Sahara, although no Spaniard who was there ever reported hartebeests in this region. The IUCN even states that the last wild bubal hartebeest was shot between 1945 and 1954 in Algeria.

Harper refers in his 1945 book to several search expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—including areas where bubal hartebeests had still been numerous just a few decades earlier—all of which were unsuccessful. This evidence supports an extinction of the bubal hartebeest before the 1940s or 1950s.

Few museum specimens exist

Bubal hartebeests were frequently captured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to be kept privately or publicly in zoos in Great Britain, Italy, France, or Germany. The London Zoo, for example, held bubal hartebeests from 1883 to 1897 and from 1906 to 1907. The last bubal hartebeest kept in human care, a female, probably died on November 9, 1923 at the former Paris Zoo Jardin des Plantes, where she had lived for 18 years.

Despite the frequent housing of bubal hartebeests in European zoos, there appears to be only a limited number of museum specimens today. For example, the German-American zoologist Ernst Schwarz and A. E. Ruxton searched in 1929 as part of their research on the genus of hartebeests (Alcelaphus) for museum specimens of bubal antelopes in the European countries where the animals had been kept in captivity, but could not find any. And Harper also writes:

“The typical race of this species was a frequent guest in menageries in earlier years. But we have seen neither a skin nor skull of a specimen killed in the wild. There are none in the British, Paris, or Berlin museums. In fact, it seems very likely that this form is entirely extinct. All inquiries in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have proved fruitless…”

Extinct and Vanishing Mammals of the Old World, 1945, Francis Harper

Harper does, however, mention a mounted female bubal hartebeest that the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia reportedly received from the Zoological Society of Philadelphia in 1905. This is likely the only known museum specimen of the bubal hartebeest in the USA. The British mammalogist Guy Dollman writes in an article published in 1937 in the journal Oryx about five additional museum specimens, including a head of a female bubal hartebeest in the National Collection—possibly the specimen from Tring?

A more recent study from 2007 also shows how rare bubal hartebeests are in collections. In Evolution of Fighting Structures in Hartebeest, biologists Isabella Capellini and Leonard Morris Gosling examined 382 skulls from various European museums and 13 private collections of eight species from the hartebeest group. Of the bubal, however, they could locate only five specimens, none of which had a complete skull. For comparison: 141 museum specimens of the red hartebeest (Alcelaphus caama) were available to the researchers. Only of the tora hartebeest (A. buselaphus tora), which according to the IUCN was last recorded in 1999 and is therefore listed as “critically endangered (possibly extinct),” did Capellini and Gosling also find only a few museum specimens (seven).

Bubal antelope: A subspecies of the hartebeest

The bubal hartebeest, scientifically described in 1766 by the German naturalist and explorer Peter Simon Pallas, is one of seven subspecies of the hartebeest endemic to Africa, with the bubal hartebeest representing the nominate subspecies. The red hartebeest (A. caama) and the Lichtenstein’s hartebeest (A. lichtensteinii) are sometimes also considered sister species of the extinct bubal antelope.

Like other hartebeests, the bubal was a very social animal. This is evident at least from an account by the Spanish chronicler Luis del Mármol Carvajal, who wrote in 1573 that he had seen herds of 100 to 200 animals in northern Morocco. The only predator that preyed on the bubal hartebeest was the Barbary lion. When it disappeared from the bubal’s habitat, humans with firearms took its place.

The bubal hartebeest is far from the only ungulate (Ungulata) to have gone extinct in Africa in the last 250 years: the bluebuck disappeared around 1800, the quagga in 1872, the Cape warthog in the 1870s, the red gazelle in 1894, Roberts’ lechwe (Kobus leche robertsi), an antelope subspecies from Zambia, went extinct in the mid-20th century, and the western black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis longipes) in 2006. Hunting played a role in the extinction of all these species.

Hartebeests back in the Levant?

The ecological modeling in the Wolkowski study examined not only past climatic conditions but also projected the suitability of potential habitats well into the 21st century. The result: the southern Levant remains, even under pessimistic climate scenarios, a habitat that would in principle be suitable for hartebeests.

The models show that neither rising temperatures nor changing precipitation patterns would make the region uninhabitable for a large, grazing antelope. On the contrary: the ecological niche of the bubal was apparently broader than long assumed. Even in the future, no drastic deterioration in habitat quality is expected. In some scenarios, the habitat even remains very stable. These results are consistent with historical findings: even in antiquity, bubal antelopes lived in areas that had relatively low precipitation and pronounced seasonality compared to North Africa.

The researchers of the study therefore venture a conceptual step that is increasingly discussed in conservation biology: the possibility of reintroduction. Of course, the bubal itself is extinct, but other hartebeest subspecies still exist, and some are genetically and ecologically very close to the bubal. The western hartebeest (Alcelaphus major) in particular is considered a potentially suitable candidate, as it is the most closely related to the bubal. Others, such as Swayne’s hartebeest (A. swaynei), are in turn better adapted to dry conditions and could even have advantages in an increasingly arid future.

A reintroduction would not aim to bring back the bubal itself—that is impossible—but to restore its ecological function. Large grass-eating ungulates like hartebeests shape landscapes, maintain open habitats, influence plant growth, and affect nutrient cycles. With their disappearance, these processes were lost in many places.

The idea of replacing extinct species with closely related “functional surrogates” is increasingly taken up in modern rewilding. For example, in Japan it was at one time considered to introduce gray wolves as a replacement for the extinct apex predator there—the Hokkaido wolf—in order to control the greatly increased Ezo sika deer population, which has become an increasing problem since the wolf’s disappearance.

Applied to the Levant, this means: a currently living hartebeest could in the long term take over the lost ecological role of the bubal. A reintroduction would be a complex undertaking that would require careful habitat analyses, long-term protection, and close cooperation with conservation authorities. But according to the researchers, the ecological foundation is there. The Levant was not only a historical habitat of the bubal; it could under today’s conditions become one again.

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Sources

• Brehm, A. E. (1911). Brehms Tierleben. Allgemeine Kunde des Tierreichs (4., vollständig neubearb. Aufl.).
  https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23282765M/Brehms_Tierleben.
• Capellini, I., & Gosling, L. M. (2006). The evolution of fighting structures in hartebeest. Evolutionary Ecology Research, 8(7), 997–1011. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227419377_Evolution_of_fighting_structures_in_hartebeest
• Day, D. (1981). The Doomsday Book of Animals.
• Dollman, J. Guy (1937). Mammals which have recently become extinct and those on the verge of extinction. Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (n.s.) 30: 67–74.
• Haltenorth, T., & Diller, H. (1980). A field guide to the mammals of Africa including Madagascar.
• Harper, F. (1945). Extinct and vanishing mammals of the Old World.
• Loggers, C. O., Thévenot, M., & Aulagnier, S. (1992). Status and distribution of Moroccan wild ungulates. Biological Conservation, 59(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-3207(92)90708-U
• Pallas, P. S. (1766). Miscellanea zoologica: quibus novae imprimis atque obscurae animalium species describuntur et observationibus iconibusque illustrantur. Hagae Comitum: Petrum van Cleef. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43321016
• Panouse, J. B. (1957). Les Mammifères du Maroc.
• Ruxton, A. E., & Schwarz, E. (1929). On hybrid hartebeests and on the distribution of the Alcelaphus buselaphus group. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 99(4), 757–770. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1929.tb07706.x
• Wolkowski, U., Horwitz, L. K., Di Crosta, G., et al. (2025). Taxonomic and ecological characterization of the extinct Levantine hartebeest, Alcelaphus buselaphus (Pallas, 1766) (Bovidae: Alcelaphini). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 205(3). https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaf153
• Zeckau, H., & Aermes, C. (2007). Brehms verlorenes Tierleben: Illustriertes Lexikon der ausgestorbenen Vögel und Säugetiere.