Its mane was not as developed as in the roan and sable antelopes; its ears were shorter and blunter, not tipped with black; and it had a darker tail tuft and smaller teeth.

The bluebuck was confined to the southwestern Cape when encountered by Europeans, but fossil evidence and rock paintings show that it originally had a larger distribution.

According to German zoologist Erna Mohr's 1967 book about the bluebuck, the 1719 account of the Cape of Good Hope published by the traveler Peter Kolbe appears to be the first publication containing a mention of the species.

In 1975, Husson and Holthuis examined the original Dutch version of Kolbe's book and concluded that the illustration did not depict a bluebuck, but rather a greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros), and that the error was due to a mistranslation into German.

[6] The Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant made the next published illustration, and included an account of the antelope, calling it "blue goat", in his 1771 Synopsis of Quadrupeds, based on a skin from the Cape of Good Hope purchased from Amsterdam.

In 1778, a drawing by the Swiss-Dutch natural philosopher Jean-Nicolas-Sébastien Allamand was included in Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle; he called the antelope tzeiran, the Siberian name for the goitered gazelle (Gazella subgutturosa).

[4][7][8] Another record of the bluebuck appears in the travel memoirs of French explorer François Levaillant, published in the 1780s, describing his quest to discover the land to the east of the Cape of Good Hope, "Hottentots Holland".

[9] In 1853, the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck stated that the type specimen was an adult male skin now in the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden (formerly Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie), collected in Swellendam and present in Haarlem before 1776.

[11] This revision was commonly accepted by other writers, such as the British zoologists Philip Sclater and Oldfield Thomas, who restricted the genus Antilope to the blackbuck (A. cervicapra) in 1899.

However, the original 1845 naming of the genus with the roan antelope as a single species was overlooked and later suppressed by the ICZN, leading to some taxonomic confusion.

Four assigned skulls (those in Glasgow, Leiden, Paris and Berlin) were shown to belong to either sable or roan antelopes, as were two pairs of horns (in Cape Town and St. Andrews).

The Austrian zoologist Franz Friedrich Kohl pointed out the distinct features of the bluebuck in 1866, followed by Sclater and Thomas, who rejected the synonymy in 1899.

[3] In 1974, the American biologist Richard G. Klein showed (based on fossils) that the bluebuck and roan antelope occurred sympatrically on the coastal plain of the southwestern Cape from Oakhurst to Uniondale during the early Holocene, supporting their status as separate species.

[18][20] In 1996, an analysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bluebuck specimen in Vienna by South African biologist Terence J. Robinson's and colleagues showed that it was outside the clade containing the roan and sable antelopes.

[20] In 2017, a reconstruction of the entire bluebuck mitogenome by Portuguese biologists Gonçalo Espregueira Themudo and Paula F. Campos, based on bone powder extracted from the horns in Uppsala, contradicted the 1996 results.

[6] Similarities to the roan and the sable antelopes in terms of dental morphology make it highly probable that the bluebuck was predominantly a selective grazer, and fed mainly on grasses.

[28] A 2013 study by the Australian palaeontologist J. Tyler Faith and colleagues noted the scarcity of morphological evidence to show that the bluebuck could have survived the summers in the western margin of the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), when the grasses are neither palatable nor nutritious.

[29] Rock paintings in the Caledon river valley of the Free State province in eastern South Africa have been identified as bluebucks, which also confirms the once wider distribution of the species.

The fossil record suggested that the bluebuck occurred in large numbers during the last glacial period (nearly 0.1 million years ago), and was more common than sympatric antelopes.

[18] Faith and colleagues noted that the western and southern CFR were separated by biogeographical barriers, such as the Cape Fold Belt and afromontane forests.

[28] The causes of the drastic decline in bluebuck populations just before the 15th and 16th centuries have not been investigated; competition with livestock and habitat deterioration could have been major factors in its depletion.

[29] In a 1976 study of fossils in the Southern Cape, Klein observed that the bluebuck's habitat preferences were similar to those of the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) and the reedbucks (Redunca).

[20] Faith and colleagues stated in 2013 that the results of the sea level changes in the early Holocene may also have played a role in the decline of the species, and left only the southern population to survive into historical times.

[38] In 1990, the South African zoologist Brian D. Colohan argued that an 1853 eyewitness report of a "bastard gemsbok" seen near Bethlehem, Free State, actually referred to a bluebuck, 50 years after the last individuals in Swellendam were shot.

They show six antelopes facing a man, and were supposedly inspired by shamanic trance; they may depict a Bushman visiting the spirit-world through a tunnel.

The animals in the paintings are similar in proportion to the reedbuck, but the large ears, horns, and lack of a mane rule out species other than the bluebuck.

[30] A South African fable, The Story of the Hare, mentions a bluebuck (referred to as inputi) that, among other animals, is appointed to guard a kraal.