A one-ton antelope that clicks as it walks and can clear 2.5 metres
Herds of eland announce themselves with a strange clicking. One explanation is that these antelopes are so heavy their split hooves spread apart under the load and snap together as each foot lifts. A bull can top 900 kilograms, yet a startled eland can jump 2.5 metres straight up from a standstill.
The common eland roams the savannahs, woodlands and grasslands of East and Southern Africa, from Ethiopia down to South Africa, avoiding dense forest and swamp. Bulls stand up to about 1.8 metres at the shoulder and have been recorded at 942 kilograms, though 500 to 600 is more usual; cows are smaller. Both sexes carry spiral-ridged horns, the males' thicker and shorter for head-butting contests in the rut, the females' longer for fending predators off calves. Older males turn bluish grey and grow a dense forehead tuft and a heavy dewlap.
Size costs speed. It is the slowest antelope, topping out around 40 kilometres an hour and tiring fast, but it can keep up a trot of about 22 kilometres an hour indefinitely. Herds of up to 500 animals graze and browse without defending territories, and they warn each other with barks and body language.
The names are a pile-up of borrowings. Dutch settlers at the Cape named it after the elk, the word eland being the Dutch cousin of English elk. The scientific name Taurotragus oryx joins Greek words for bull and billy goat, the goat part a nod to the beardlike tuft in its ear, with oryx, meaning pickaxe, for the pointed horns. The German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas described it in 1766.
Its genetics are odd too. Males have 31 chromosomes and females 32, because the Y chromosome is fused onto another chromosome, an arrangement shared with the greater kudu. At the San Diego Zoo Safari Park an eland and a kudu accidentally produced a hybrid, which was sterile. People in southern Africa have domesticated eland for meat and leather, and their milk, richer in butterfat than cow's milk, can keep for up to eight months.
Source: Common eland
