Editorial
The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone
From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.
The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.
