Is a Wildebeest an Antelope? What a Gnu Really Is

What exactly is an antelope?

“Antelope” is a handy everyday word rather than a strict scientific group. It covers the many members of the cattle family, Bovidae, that are not cattle, buffalo, bison, sheep or goats. That includes gazelles, impalas, kudus, elands, oryxes, springbok and wildebeest.

All of these animals share some key features. They are even-toed hoofed mammals that chew the cud, with a four-chambered stomach for digesting plants. Most important, they have true horns: a core of bone covered by a sheath of keratin, the same material as fingernails. True horns are never shed and keep growing throughout life, unlike the antlers of deer.

Most antelopes live in Africa, with a smaller number in Asia. North America’s pronghorn is a famous look-alike that is not a true antelope; see Is a pronghorn an antelope?.

Where wildebeest fit in the family

Within Bovidae, wildebeest belong to the subfamily Alcelaphinae, a group of large African grazing antelopes. Their closest relatives are:

• Hartebeests, with long faces and sharply bent horns.
• Topi and tsessebe, glossy reddish antelopes of the savanna.
• Bontebok and blesbok of South Africa.
• The hirola, a rare antelope of the Kenya-Somalia border.

Like their relatives, wildebeest have long faces, high shoulders and sloping backs, and they are built for traveling long distances across open plains. They are also fast runners, reaching about 80 km/h (50 mph).

Why does a wildebeest look like a cow?

Early European visitors to southern Africa thought wildebeest looked like a mix of several animals, and the name reflects that: wildebeest means “wild beast” or “wild cattle” in Afrikaans and Dutch.

Several features give that impression:

• A heavy front end. Wildebeest have massive shoulders and necks and slimmer hindquarters, more like a buffalo than a slender gazelle.
• Curved horns in both sexes. The horns of the blue wildebeest sweep outward and then curve up, a shape that resembles the horns of a female African buffalo.
• A broad muzzle suited to cropping short grass in big mouthfuls, rather than the narrow muzzle of browsing antelopes.
• A mane, beard and long black tail that look horse-like.

These features are adaptations for a life of grazing and migrating in large herds, not signs of a close link to cattle.

How wildebeest differ from most other antelopes

Many antelopes, such as gazelles and kudus, hide their newborn young in tall grass or thickets for the first days or weeks while the mother feeds nearby. Wildebeest calves are different. They are “followers”: a calf can stand within minutes of birth and runs beside its mother almost at once. This suits life in huge, mobile herds on open plains, where there is nowhere to hide.

Wildebeest also give birth in a short, synchronized season, so that predators are flooded with more calves than they can eat. Few other antelopes take this strategy to the same extreme.

Blue wildebeest vs black wildebeest

There are two species of wildebeest:

The blue wildebeest is by far the more numerous and is the species of the Great Migration. The black wildebeest was hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century, with only a few hundred surviving on farms. Thanks to protection and breeding, it has recovered and is now listed as Least Concern.

The two species split roughly a million years ago, but they can still interbreed where they are kept together, which has become a conservation concern on some fenced reserves in South Africa.

Where does the name “gnu” come from?

Gnu is the older English name, taken from a word used by the Khoekhoe or San peoples of southern Africa. It is usually pronounced “noo” in English. Some say it imitates the snorting call of the animal, and territorial bulls do make a nasal “ga-noo” sound, but the exact origin is uncertain.

Today, wildebeest is the more common name in Africa and in scientific writing, while gnu survives in crosswords, children’s books and a famous comic song. Both are correct, and both refer to the same two species.

So, what is a wildebeest?

A wildebeest is a large, grazing African antelope in the cattle family. It has true horns, chews the cud and lives in herds on open grasslands. It may look a little like a cow, a horse and a buffalo at once, but in the family tree it sits firmly among the antelopes, close to the hartebeests and topi. To see wildebeest at their most spectacular, read What is the Great Migration?.