The bluebuck was a species of antelope found in South Africa until the early 1800s. With a lesser mane than roan and sable antelopes, its name derives from a distinct gray-blue coat. When European colonists encountered the animal during the seventeenth century, it was already in decline, due perhaps to a changing grassland habitat around the Cape Peninsula. Hunted to extinction by settlers within a century, biologists did not have long to observe the creature's behavior before it vanished --- many of the extant illustrations of bluebucks seem to have been based on taxidermized specimens. Originally thought to be a blue goat by Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, scientists now know that the animal once occupied a larger territory. It appears in shamanic paintings attributed to the San peoples and in Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), where the antelope's belly is said to be as white as the driven snow.