The okapi’s skull. But where is its body?

Name: Powell-Cotton’s okapi
Species: Okapia johnstoni
Dates: ?-1906
Claim to fame: Without body
Where now: Powell-Cotton Museum, Quex Park

The forest was not quite as he’d imagined it.

In contrast to “the dismal miasmic place of my imagination, where unhealthy mists and perpetual twilight reigned supreme,” the British explorer Percy Powell-Cotton found the Ituri Rainforest to be something closer to paradise. “Myriads of little sunbeams filtered through the leaves, to settle on the undergrowth in bright patches of light, where the butterflies and birds loved to flit to and fro,” he wrote.

Everywhere he went – Powell-Cotton kept a sporting lookout for animals that might strengthen the natural history collections back home and in 1904 he set his sights on the okapi. This meant following in the footsteps of his childhood hero Henry Morton Stanley and heading for one of the most remote and least explored parts of Africa. For it was in the Ituri forest in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo that Stanley had noted the existence of this “donkey-like” rarity in the 1870s. In 1901, the first complete okapi specimen to come out of Africa had reached Europe. But Powell-Cotton was determined to hunt one down for himself.

Once in okapi country, Powell-Cotton didn’t mess around, employing the services of Akuki, a man “renowned for his skill in okapi hunting”. A couple of days later, his hired help sent back word that he’d shot “a fine male”. This was a set-back for Powell-Cotton, so keen to be the one to pull the trigger. It was also a logistical poser because he had to get to the beast and skin it before the rot set in. “However, by dint of working on it nearly all one night, I managed to preserve it well enough.” Here is a satellite map of the exact location he recorded for the kill.

Still hoping to obtain his very own okapi, Powell-Cotton hung around in the vicinity for a further couple of weeks. During which time, it appears that local hunters captured a second okapi in a pit trap. But Powell-Cotton never realised his dream of shooting his very own specimen. “In spite of hours spent in following fresh tracks, I never so much as caught sight of an okapi.” In fact, he wrote in the Journal of the African Society, “there appears to me to be only a remote chance of a sportsman coming across these extremely timid denizens of the forest undergrowth.”

Back in England in 1907, Powell-Cotton gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society about his Congo expedition. In attendance was the zoologist Richard Lydekker, who was called on afterwards to add some words on behalf of the Natural History Museum to which Powell-Cotton had donated one of the two okapi specimens. “It is not only the first male specimen the museum has received, but it is the best okapi-skin, the taxidermists tell me, that has been brought to this country,” he said. The mounted skin of this specimen is still on show, in gallery 5 at the Natural History Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire.

Powell-Cotton kept the other okapi for himself, though not before lending the skull to the Natural History Museum’s Ray Lankester, who was working on a detailed monograph of the mysterious okapi. Once Powell-Cotton had got it back, he added it to his own museum, established at Quex Park – the family home – in Kent in 1896.

This weekend, more than 100 years on, the Powell-Cotton Museum opens a new interactive gallery containing more than 700 objects. One of them is the skull of Powell-Cotton’s okapi and in the same cabinet there is a “bandolier”, a strip of okapi hide used by the Ituri natives as a belt (which probably comes from yet another okapi). “The resulting redesigned and reinterpreted gallery is spectacular and will provide years of hands-on fun and learning experience for all ages,” says museum director Karen Botha.

What I’m wondering in all this is where the rest of Powell-Cotton’s okapi has got to. I asked Keiko Higashi, project manager at the Powell-Cotton Museum and one of the curators of Gallery 6, but this drew a blank. “I’m afraid we don’t have the skeleton or the skin,” she says.

So here it is people. The hunt for Powell-Cotton’s okapi is still on.

Tale ends

The act of researching Powell-Cotton’s okapi has raised several questions that I have not been able to answer to my satisfaction. If you can help solve any of these outstanding animal-related mysteries, please leave a comment or send me a message on Twitter @WayOfThePanda.

1. Which okapi went to the Natural History Museum and which one went to the Powell-Cotton Museum?
2. The Powell-Cotton Museum does not have the skin or the skeleton of Powell-Cotton’s okapi, just the skull. Where did the rest go?

If there is a zoological specimen with a great story that you would like to see profiled, please contact Henry Nicholls @WayOfThePanda.