Antelope Facts You’ll Never Forget

When you first think of an antelope, you can see the elegant legs running fast in the wild. Antelopes have slender, long and strong legs – these help them in running fast and covering more ground in each stride.

Antelopes, such as the gerenuks and dibatags, have such strong hind legs that they can stand on them and reach the food on tall trees. Gazelles and springboks can leap great heights and run really fast too.

A beautiful dense furred pelage covers these beautiful species. Usually, their coats are in various multiple hues of brown. They also have pale white or beige underbodies.

Some exceptions include the zebra-duiker who have multiple stripes on their backs, or the black lechwe, or even the Jentink’s duiker which has multiple tints of black, white, brown and grey. The Arabian oryx is a proud owner of a silvery-white fur coat, and the southern oryx and beisa sport a grey-black pelage.

Antelopes have strong molars which helps them chew on the cud and crush down the grass. This species does not have upper incisors; instead they have a strong upper gum pad which works together with its lower incisors to chew on food.

The eyes of antelopes are placed in such a way that they have can cover a broader area in sight. They also have sharp sense of hearing and smell.

In almost every antelope species, both the males and females have horns, though the males have bigger ones. Males usually have bigger bodies in most of the species. The horns of some species are straight and point upwards, whereas some have spiraled horns. These horns are covered with a thick sheath. Some species have ridges in their horns.