Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
It’s one of the conservation community’s best-known stories of hope. Twenty-five years ago, the scimitar-horned oryx — a pale, long-horned antelope built for life on the edge of the Sahara — was pushed to the point of extinction after decades of overhunting and loss of available habitat. Today, after a successful captive breeding and reintroduction campaign, the population in the wild has grown to over 600 individuals. The species was downlisted from "Extinct in the Wild" to "Endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2023 — an exceedingly rare victory for such a large mammal.
But beneath this remarkable story is a less obvious one. For several decades, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute have helped drive the oryx recovery effort — and their work has expanded to help protect even more of Africa’s endangered antelopes.
Learn more: https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/news/how-smithsonian-science-helping-scimitar-horned-oryx-recover-and-thrive.
It’s one of the conservation community’s best-known stories of hope. Twenty-five years ago, the scimitar-horned oryx — a pale, long-horned antelope built for life on the edge of the Sahara — was pushed to the point of extinction after decades of overhunting and loss of available habitat. Today, after a successful captive breeding and reintroduction campaign, the population in the wild has grown to over 600 individuals. The species was downlisted from "Extinct in the Wild" to "Endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2023 — an exceedingly rare victory for such a large mammal.
But beneath this remarkable story is a less obvious one. For several decades, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute have helped drive the oryx recovery effort — and their work has expanded to help protect even more of Africa’s endangered antelopes.
Learn more: https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/news/how-smithsonian-science-helping-scimitar-horned-oryx-recover-and-thrive.
