In a South Africa taxidermist called Reinhold Rau set up the Quagga Project , with the aim of using selective breeding to bring back the quagga from extinction and reintroduce it into reserves in its former habitat. With each new generation of foals, these distinct colourings have indeed become stronger and more defined.
Once this number reaches 50 there are plans for the herd to live together in one reserve. What is a quagga? Do these animals near Cape Town deserve the name quagga?
Please do join in using the comments section below! Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. What Is A Quagga? Teen Earth Day Hero talks plastic pollution. How will EPA cuts affect your neighborhood? Teen leads effort to save environment.
Earth Day highlights fragile environment. America's aging pipelines. The Keystone pipeline debate in 2 mins. Like zebras, the quagga has stripes, though these only appear on the front half of their bodies. Unlike the zebra, they are brown along the rear half of their body. These animals used to roam South Africa in vast herds, but European settlers fixed the beasts in their sights, killing them at an alarming rate.
By the s, the last known example had died. Now, however, scientists have bred an animal that looks strikingly similar with the help of DNA and selective breeding. As a result of this generalization, no one realized the significance of her death. It was as simple as that. Like other animal species that disappeared in Africa during the 19th century, the quagga was hunted to extinction. It was the age of the great white hunter , when privileged Europeans with too much time on their hands and too much firepower at their disposal roamed Africa, killing indiscriminately.
Some animals, such as bontebok and black wildebeest, were reduced to just dozens of animals. Its demise was swift and poorly documented. The last-known individual died in an Amsterdam Zoo in , but no one even realized it at the time. Laws were passed in South Africa protecting the quagga from hunting in , three years after its extinction. As such, it achieved an almost-mythical status among naturalists. An animal that disappeared, in recent times, with only the merest of traces.
For years, one of the few things we really knew about the quagga is that it would never roam the veldt again. Scientists long considered the quagga as a species due to its unique appearance. Some even considered it more closely related to wild horses than zebras. In , researchers analyzed the DNA of the existing quagga skins. What they found challenged the conventional wisdom on this animal — and set off a new chapter in conservation history.
The DNA evidence determined that t he quagga was not a separate species at all, but rather a subspecies of the plains zebra. The evidence suggests that quaggas evolved their unique coat pattern relatively recently in evolutionary time, likely during the Pleistocene. They became isolated from the other plains zebra populations and rapidly evolved the less striped pattern and brown coloration. In scientific circles, discussions of quaggas inevitably lead to questions about what exactly constitutes a species or subspecies.
What makes a quagga a quagga? Should DNA alone determine species status? In the case of the quagga, the lack of specimens and reliable field observations creates more questions than answers. In all likelihood, the coat patterns of the quagga demonstrated considerable variation, just as plains zebras exhibit considerable variation in striping.
That presumption led some researchers to ask: what if some plains zebras exhibited quagga-like characteristics? If so, could these animals be bred to create an animal with fewer stripes and a browner coat?
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