Patricia Robinson, age , of SaIt Lake City, Utah, for her question:

 Is there really an okapi?

Is there really an okapi? The ancient white hunters asked this question of the cheerful Confao pygmies time after time. Oh yes, Lurahed, the little people. He is a oil fella, brvan with light marls, and he lives in the dense, leafy undergrowth of the jungle. The tiny pygmies were at home in this forest but the big white hunters could not get through the jungle foliage. The white hunters had to see to believe. So, for a long time, no outsiders took the okapi story seriously.

This attitude put the little brown people on their mettle. The next time a white hunter came by they showed him the skin of an okapi ‑ a rich, chocolate colored skin with creamy colored booties and pale darters around the thighs. This was towards the end of the last century and the world of science was agog. For it was supposed that all the sizeable animals on earth already has been studied, named and classified.

Hero was a new animal, big as a mule, and what in the world was he? Some say he must be an antelope, others said he was a kind of horse. Rumors spread. Sir Harry Johnston, governor of Jramiv, heard the story from Henry Stanley, the famous journalist who went searching through Africa, for Dr. Living stone. In 1901 Sir Harry Johnston invited all to yet some scraps of okapi skin anal, later on, a whole skin and two skulls. Now evoryone knew for sure that there was an okapi.

The skin and the skulls of the secondary creature were studied in London. The exports named it Okapia johnstoni, in honor of Sir Harry who had done so much to prove that the animal really existed.

Next came the job of classifying the okapi. It was not a horse, not an antelope and not a zebra. He was, of all things, a giraffe. The timid brown fellow with his mule‑like gars is really the relative of the animal skyscraper we all know as the wolf. The okapi, however, is no skyscraper. His neck is normal size.

In his native home the okapi never sees the bright light of day, oven though he lives near the equator. For sunlight filters through the dense flora but dimly. His sensitive nose and ears are of  more use to him than his eyes in the shadowy jungle. Like his cousin the giraffe, he has a pair of short horns covered with skin and hair. His horns are not fixed in the bone as are the antlers of a deer. Those special, fur­ covered, non‑attached horns help to classify the okapi with the giraffe.

The okapis is a hoofed animal and a browser. The pyrios, who are small enough to enter his lcafy home, can watch him nibbling from the branches. Few okapis have been captured and sent to live in zoos. The first one out of Africa was sent to the king of the Belitlns. Then on August 3, 1931, an okapi arrived. New York zoological Park, the very first one to imigrate to the New World.