| OCR Text |
Show 246 DR. P. CIIALMERS MITCHELL ON [Apr. 18, nearly pure white, and the lower parts of the legs, as in the northern forms generally, are white, showing only the faintest trace of spots. The middle line of the face and forehead, as in the bull, has a pale fawn band, narrower and paler than the corresponding region in the Nubian Giraffe. Between the nostrils in the bull and the young female is a dark spot, not recorded by Mr. Lydekker, and absent in the specimen of Nubian type at the Natural History Museum. The dark marks inside the pale ears are arranged in most Giraffes in three distinct pencillings. Although I have not seen this pattern called attention to, and although it is slurred over in most of the published figures, it is present in all the Giraffes that I have seen, except in the head of the Nubian Giraffe mounted in the British Museum (Natural History). In that specimen there are only two pencillings, and in the young female which is the subject of this note the arrangement is not so clearly divided into three (text-fig. 51, A) as in most Giraffes, although it does not resemble the Nubian form in this respect. It would be interesting to have more information on this point, not only with regard to other examples of the Nubian and Nigerian Giraffes, but in the cases of many other animals. In quite a large number of Antelopes, for instance, there is a trifid dark pattern inside the ear, but I do not know of any observations on this subject. Two rather regular rows of pale spots lie along the face under the eye and ear, the arrangement of these being similar in the bull and young female, and different from the irregular spots in the corresponding region of the Nubian form. The blotches on the front of the neck of the young female differ considerably from those in the case of the bull. They are much more numerous and more regularly quadrangular, and instead of fading off into the ground-colour, they are sharply marked oft' from it. It is possible that in the course of growth they might come to assume the elongated shape and indefinite margins characteristic of the neck-blotches of the bull, but in their present form they differ considerably and yet do not approach more closely to the condition in the Nubian form. Mr Lydekker has pointed out that the occipital region, the back of the head from the root of the horns to down below the ears, is marked with small spots in all Giraffes, except the Nubian, where this region is very white, and in the Nigerian, where it is white with a few fawn spots between the ears and the horns and large fawn blotches below the ears. The young female Giraffe resembles the Nigerian bull in this region (text-fig. 51, B). Judging from these two examples, it would seem as if a special character of the Nigerian Giraffe is that the characteristic large blotches of the neck are carried higher upon the back of the head, to a region which is marked by very small spots in most Giraffes, but which in the Nubian form is white with only a very few pale spots between the ears and the horns. |
