Endangered
Scimitar oryx
Oryx dammah
The scimitar oryx, also known as the scimitar-horned oryx and the Sahara oryx, is an Oryx species that was once widespread across North Africa and parts of West and Central Africa.
Appearance
Its coat is white with a red-brown chest and black markings on the forehead and down the length of the nose. The white coat helps to reflect the heat of the desert. Calves are born with yellow coats and lack distinguishing marks, that appear later in life.
The males weigh 140–210 kg (310–460 lb) and the females 91–140 kg (201–309 lb).
Range and habitat
The scimitar oryx once inhabited grassy steppes, semideserts and deserts in a narrow strip of central north Africa (especially in Niger and Chad).
Today, it is bred in captivity in special reserves in Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal, and on private exotic animal ranches in the Texas Hill Country, United States. In 2016, a reintroduction program was launched, and currently a small herd has been successfully reintroduced in Chad.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
This species once gathered in groups of several thousand for migration. During the wet season, they migrated north into the Sahara.
Scimitar oryxes are diurnal. Scimitar oryxes in the wild usually lives in steppe and desert, where they eat foliage, grass, herbs, shrubs, succulent plants, legumes, juicy roots, buds, and fruit. If the female is not ready to mate, she runs away and circles in the reverse direction.
In crisis
In 2000, it was declared extinct in the wild on the IUCN Red List, but in 2023, it was downlisted to endangered, with a reintroduced population in Chad. The decline of the scimitar oryx population began as a result of climate change during the Neolithic period, and later it was hunted extensively for its horns. Following the Neolithic Subpluvial, around 7500 to 3500 BC, the "green Sahara" became dry and the scimitar oryx's population began to decline due to a loss of suitable habitat.
The northern population was already almost lost before the 20th century. The decline of the southern population accelerated as Europeans began to settle the area and hunt them for meat, hides, and horn trophies.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Scimitar oryx is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Scimitar oryx, Wikidata item Q369817. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
