page_title: Nyala
section_title: Taxonomy and naming
hierarchical_section_title: Nyala / Taxonomy and naming
caption_attribution_description: English: Nyala family in the Hellabrunn Zoo, Munich, Germany Hrvatski: Obitelj antilope njale u Zoološkom vrtu Hellabrunn, München, Njemačka
context_page_description: The lowland nyala or simply nyala, is a spiral-horned antelope native to southern Africa. It is a species of the family Bovidae and genus Nyala, also considered to be in the genus Tragelaphus. It was first described in 1849 by George French Angas. The body length is 135–195 cm, and it weighs 55–140 kg. The coat is maroon or rufous brown in females and juveniles, but grows a dark brown or slate grey, often tinged with blue, in adult males. Females and young males have ten or more white stripes on their sides. Only males have horns, 60–83 cm long and yellow-tipped. It exhibits the highest sexual dimorphism among the spiral-horned antelopes.
  The nyala is mainly active in the early morning and the late afternoon. It generally browses during the day if temperatures are 20–30 °C and during the night in the rainy season. As a herbivore, the nyala feeds upon foliage, fruits and grasses, with sufficient fresh water. A shy animal, it prefers water holes rather than open spaces. The nyala does not show signs of territoriality, and individuals areas can overlap each others. They are very cautious creatures.
context_section_description: The nyala was first described by George French Angas, an English naturalist, in 1849. The scientific name of nyala is Tragelaphus angasii. The name angasii is attributed to Angas, who said that Mr. Gray had named this species after Angas' father, George Fife Angas, Esq. of South Australia. But, according to Article 50.1.1 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, this is insufficient to state Gray as the author. The name "nyala" is the Tsonga name for this antelope, which is likely the source of the English, along with Zulu "inyala". Its first known use was in 1899. The word has a Bantu origin, similar to the Venda word dzì-nyálà (nyala buck).
  The nyala is the second taxon to branch off from the tragelaphine family tree just after the lesser kudu. As the nyala line has remained separate for a considerable amount of time (over 5 million years), it has now been placed in its own monotypic genus Nyala. Nyala was proposed in 1912 by American zoologist Edmund Heller, the one who had also proposed Ammelaphus (lesser kudu). but not widely recognized, and was only re-established as a valid genus in 2011 by Peter Grubb and Colin Groves. While Nyala is the accepted genus, it is still considered as a species of Tragelaphus.
  In 2005, Sandi Willows-Munro (of the University of KwaZulu-Natal) and colleagues carried out a mitochondrial analysis of the nine Tragelaphus species. mtDNA and nDNA data were compared. The results showed that the tribe Tragelaphini is monophyletic with the lesser kudu (T. imberbis) basal in the phylogeny, followed by the nyala. On the basis of mitochondrial data, studies have estimated that the lesser kudu separated from its sister clade around 13.7 million years ago. On the other hand, the nuclear data shows that lesser kudu and nyala form a clade, and collectively separated from the sister clade 13.8 million years ago.
caption: Nyala family in captivity
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