For as long as Europeans had been in Central Africa, they had heard whispers of a mysterious

creature living in the jungles, a horse of sorts in the rainforest, with horns and a striped backside.

Locals would tell stories and insist upon the creature's existence.

They even showed the westerners' hoofprints in the jungle mud,

and sometimes even gave them skins from the animal. But the colonialist scientists were unable to find

the creature themselves, and so in their minds, the animal's reality remained a mystery.

They called the animal the African unicorn. The pygmy people of the Ituri Forest called the

animal Oapi. Eventually, the scientists received the evidence they needed to classify the creature.

They managed to acquire some skins and a skull, and in 1901, the animal received their scientific

name, Ocapia John Stoney. But a few over-educated white guys naming an animal doesn't mean the creature

is suddenly known to science. It doesn't make the animal any less mysterious or less rare or

less difficult to find. All it means is that

Europeans officially know what the land's indigenous people have known for millennia, that the

animal is, in fact, real. But reality is a rather low bar, and this animal remains rather mysterious to us, even today.

It took over a hundred years after their initial, quote, unquote, discovery, to get a single

photo of this animal in the wild. And so today we are going to try and happily fail to demystify this animal.

The African unicorn, the ghost of the forest.

The Okapi.

Ocapia John Stoney.

I'm Mackin.

This is Species.

Welcome to the show. Today we're going to talk about a secretive, fascinating, and complicated

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