page_title: Bluebuck
section_title: Behaviour and ecology
hierarchical_section_title: Bluebuck / Behaviour and ecology
caption_attribution_description: Bluebuck and Klipspringer.
context_page_description: The bluebuck or blue antelope is an extinct species of antelope that lived in South Africa until around 1800. It is congeneric with the roan antelope and sable antelope, but was smaller than either. It was sometimes considered a subspecies of the roan antelope, but a genetic study has confirmed it as a distinct species.
  The largest mounted bluebuck specimen is 119 centimetres tall at the withers. Its horns measure 56.5 centimetres along the curve. The coat was a uniform bluish-grey, with a pale whitish belly. The forehead was brown, darker than the face. Its mane was not as developed as in the roan and sable antelopes; its ears were shorter and blunter, not tipped with black; and it had a darker tail tuft and smaller teeth. It also lacked the contrasting black and white patterns seen on the heads of its relatives. The bluebuck was a grazer, and may have calved where rainfall, and thus the availability of grasses, would peak. The bluebuck was confined to the southwestern Cape when encountered by Europeans, but fossil evidence and rock paintings show that it originally had a larger distribution.
context_section_description: The bluebuck, as Klein puts it, became extinct before "qualified scientists could make observations on live specimens". According to historical accounts, the bluebuck formed groups of up to 20 individuals. Similarities to the roan and the sable antelopes in terms of dental morphology make it highly probable that the bluebuck was predominantly a selective grazer, and fed mainly on grasses. The row of premolars was longer than in others of the genus, implying the presence of dicots in the diet. A 2013 study by the Australian palaeontologist J. Tyler Faith and colleagues noted the scarcity of morphological evidence to show that the bluebuck could have survived the summers in the western margin of the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), when the grasses are neither palatable nor nutritious. This might have induced a west-to-east migration, because the eastern margin receives rainfall throughout the year while precipitation in the western margin is limited to winter.
  An 18th-century account suggests that females might have left their newborn calves in isolation and returned regularly to suckle them until the calves were old enough to join herds, which is similar to the behaviour of roan and sable antelopes. Akin to other grazing antelopes, the bluebuck probably calved mainly where rainfall, and thus the availability of grasses, peaked. Such locations could be the western margin of the CFR during winter and the eastern margin of the CFR during summer. Faith et al. 2013 found that the occurrence of juveniles in bluebuck fossils decreases linearly from the west to the east, indicating that most births took place in the western CFR; due to the preference for rainfall, it may be further assumed that most births occurred during winter, when the western CFR receives most of its rainfall. The annual west-to-east migration would have followed in summer, consistent with the greater number of older juveniles in the east that would have joined herds. Juvenile fossils also occur in other places across the range, but appear to be concentrated in the western CFR.
caption: Illustration of a bluebuck and a klipspringer, 1851
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