Syrian half donkey
| Syrian half donkey | ||||||||||||
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Syrian half donkey at London Zoo, photograph from 1872 |
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| Equus hemionus hemippus | ||||||||||||
| I. Geoffroy , 1855 |
The Syrian half donkey ( Equus hemionus hemippus ), also known as Syrian onager , Syrischer Wildesel , Hemippe or locally as Achdari referred to is an extinct subspecies of Asian donkey ( Equus hemionus ). It is considered the smallest form of the modern Equidae .
features
The Syrian half donkey reached a shoulder height of about 100 cm (data of only 97 cm shoulder height are based on a mounted skeleton of a female animal, which with soft tissue cover should have been a little over a meter high). The general coat color of the male was hazel or light gray with a pink tinge. In old age the fur turned mouse gray. The color was lightest on the head and darkest on the hips. There was a light area on the front of the hips. The rear, stomach and inside of the legs were dirty gray and white. The outside of the legs, the underside of the neck, and the surface of the ears were dull purple gray. The tips of the ears were initially dark brown, but with age they were almost white. The rather long mane was a dull gray-brown. The eel line that stretched from the mane to the tail tuft was the same color and was delimited by a lighter area. The area above the nostrils was gray-white. The nostrils were very large and the nasal area was swollen. In the females, the fur was hazel to fawn brown. The back and the underside were pure white.
Occurrence
The distribution area stretched from Palestine via Syria to Iraq .
die out
The Syrian half donkey is mentioned as early as antiquity and the writings of the Old Testament . A hunting depiction is on a palace relief of King Aššur-bāni-apli of Nineveh . Another mention is made by Xenophon from the year 401 BC. During the 16th and 17th centuries the Syrian half donkey was still common. The British explorer John Eldred saw this wild ass in 1584 between the Iraqi city of Hīt and Aleppo ; In 1603, the English traveler John Cartwright saw not far from Anah on the Euphrates "every day large flocks of wild animals which, like the wild asses, were completely white." In 1625 the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle described a caught wild ass or onager in Basra in southern Iraq. Apparently the Syrian half donkey disappeared from northern Arabia during the 19th century, in the Syrian desert and in Palestine it became increasingly rare from 1850 onwards. According to Henry Baker Tristram , wild asses were still common in Mesopotamia around 1884 . He wrote that in the summer one could still see large white herds in the Armenian mountains. The last refuge of the Syrian half donkeys was the Lavaland in the southeast of Jebel ad-Duruz , an elevated volcanic region in southern Syria, in the administrative district of as-Suwaida .
Several authors state that the last Syrian half donkey in human care died in 1927 in Schönbrunn Zoo . On the other hand, the zoologist Otto Antonius wrote that a male specimen still lived in the same zoo in 1928, which had been caught in the desert north of Aleppo in 1911. In the wild, the Syrian half donkey died out around the same time. The last specimen was shot in Jordan in 1927 at the Al-Gharns oasis not far from el-Azraq (Lake Azraq). During the First World War , the half donkeys were an easy prey to the heavily armed Turkish, Bedouin and British troops. During this time the automobile displaced camels and trains, and access to the desert was greatly facilitated. Otto Antonius wrote in 1938:
Individual evidence
- ^ Colin Peter Groves and V. Mazák: On some taxonomic problems of Asiatic wild asses; with the description of a new subspecies (Perissodactyla; Equidae). Zeitschrift für Mammaliankunde 32, 1967, pp. 321–355 (p. 231)
- ↑ Xenophon: Anabasis 1,5,2
- ^ Henry B. Tristram (1884): The survey of western Palestine: The fauna and flora of Palestine. The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1884.
- ↑ Equus hemionus ssp. hemippus in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2013.2. Listed by: Moehlman, P. & Feh, C. (Equid Specialist Group), 2002. Retrieved May 28, 2014.
- ^ Antonius, O. (1928): Observations on solipeds in Schonbrunn. I. The Syrian half ass (Equus hemionus hemippus I. Geoffr.). Zool. Garten, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2, pp. 19–25, 5 illustrations.
- ^ Antonius, O. (1938): On the geographical distribution, in former times and to-day, of the Recent Equidae. In: Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1937, vol. 107, ser. B, pp. 557-564.
literature
- Day, D. (1981): The Doomsday Book of Animals , Ebury Press, London.
- Harper, F. (1945): Extinct and Vanishing Mammals of the Old World . Special Publication No. 12, American Committee for International Wild Life Protection, New York Zoological Park, New York 60, NY
- Qumsiye, Mazin: Mammals of the Holy Land . Texas Tech University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0896723641 .
