[4] The bubal hartebeest was described as uniformly sand colored, save for "an ill-defined patch of greyish on each side of the muzzle above the nostrils", and the terminal tuft of the tail, which was black.

According to 19th century writers, the bubal hartebeest preferred rocky areas with a fair amount of vegetation, in contrast to the sandy, drier habitat of the Addax.

[7] It was also present with certainty in the Southern Levant prior to the Iron Age,[8] but Francis Harper (1945) found only "none too well substantiated" recent historical records from Palestine and Arabia.

The northern limit of the bubal hartebeest's range was the Mediterranean coast; large herds were still reported existing in Morocco north of the Atlas Mountains in 1738.

While Harper, writing in 1945, considered that the subspecies could still possibly exist at the time in this area, he also mentioned that different campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s failed to find any animals in Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia, even in regions where it had been reported as numerous only a few decades before.

[11] Individuals of bubal hartebeest were sometimes captured and kept in British, French, Italian and German private and public zoos around the start of the 20th century, although Ruxton and Schwarz (1929) failed to find any preserved in museums of these countries.

[citation needed] The bubal hartebeest is one of many extinct animals depicted in the Roman mosaics of Hippo Regius (modern Algeria) that date back to the 2nd and 4th centuries AD.