Wildebeest "The Great Space Coaster" (newscaster Gary Gnu), and "The Lion King" (the wildebeest stampede that resulted in Mufasa's death). Michael Flanders wrote a humorous song called "The Gnu", which was very popular when he performed it, with Donald Swann, in a revue called "At the Drop of a Hat", which opened in London on 31 December 1956. The wildebeest is the mascot of the GNU Project and GNU operating system. In the "Llama Llama" picture-book series by Anna Dewdney, an anthropomorphized wildebeest named Nelly Gnu is the main character, Llama Llama's best friend, and is also featured in a title
Wildebeest the family Bovidae and subfamily Alcelaphinae, where its closest relatives are the hartebeest ("Alcelaphus" spp.), the hirola ("Beatragus hunteri"), and species in the genus "Damaliscus", such as the topi, the tsessebe, the blesbok and the bontebok. The name "Connochaetes" was given by German zoologist Hinrich Lichtenstein in 1812. Dutch settlers first discovered wildebeest in about 1700, on their way to the interior of South Africa. Due to their resemblance to wild cattle, these people called them "wild ox" or "wildebeest". The blue wildebeest was first known to westerners in the northern part of South Africa a century later, in the