Friday, August 20, 2010

Strange long-haired gazelle photographed

Everyone who's seen African nature documentaries knows the striped Thomson's gazelle, a small antelope that attracts - but often outruns - the big cats. No one has ever seen a "Tommy" like this, though. The young female photographed in Kenya has longhair all over its body in place of the normal short coat of the species. It looks a bit like an antelope-shaped goat. You never know what will come out of the cosmic card-shuffling of genetics, but what's interesting here is that there is no record of this condition being seen before in this species.

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