The okapi is observed for the first…

The okapi is observed for the first time by Europeans (previously known only to African natives).

Although the okapi is unknown to the Western world until the twentieh century, it may have been depicted since the early fifth century BCE on the façade of the Apadana at Persepolis, a gift from the Ethiopian procession to the Achaemenid kingdom.

For years, Europeans in Africa had heard of an animal that they came to call the African unicorn.

The animal was brought to prominent European attention by speculation on its existence found in press reports covering Henry Morton Stanley's journeys in 1887.

In his travelogue of exploring the Congo, Stanley mentioned a kind of donkey that the natives called the atti, which scholars will later identify as the okapi.

When the British special commissioner in Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, discovers some Pygmy inhabitants of the Congo being abducted by a showman for exhibition, he rescues them and promise to return them to their homes.

The Pygmies feed Johnston's curiosity about the animal mentioned in Stanley's book.

Johnston is puzzled by the okapi tracks the natives showed him; while he had expected to be on the trail of some sort of forest-dwelling horse, the tracks are of a cloven-hoofed beast.

Though Johnston does not see an okapi himself, he does manage to obtain pieces of striped skin and eventually a skull.

From this skull, the okapi is correctly classified as a relative of the giraffe; the species is formally recognized as Okapia johnstoni, first described as Equus johnstoni by English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater in 1901.

The generic name Okapia derives either from the Mbuba name okapi or the related Lese Karo name o'api, while the specific name (johnstoni) is in recognition of Johnston, who first acquired an okapi specimen for science from the Ituri Forest.