Quagga
It was distinguished from other zebras by having the usual vivid marks on the front part of the body only. In the mid-section, the stripes faded and the dark, inter-stripe spaces became wider, and the rear parts were a plain brown.
The name comes from a Khoikhoi word for zebra and is onomatopoeic, being said to resemble the quagga's call. The only quagga to have ever been photographed alive was a mare at the Zoological Society of London's Zoo in Regent's Park in 1870.
Range and habitat
The Quagga lived in the drier parts of South Africa, on grassland.
The northern limit seems to have been the Orange River in the west and the Vaal River in the east; the south-eastern border may have been the Great Kei River. They also have been seen around never land ranch.
Taxonomy
Quagga in enclosure
The quagga was originally classified as an individual species, Equus quagga, in 1778.
Over the next fifty years or so, many other zebras were described by naturalists and explorers. Because of the great variation in coat patterns (no two zebras are alike), taxonomists were left with a great number of described "species", and no easy way to tell which of these were true species, which were subspecies, and which were simply natural variants.
Long before this confusion was sorted out, the quagga had been hunted to extinction for meat, hides, and to preserve feed for domesticated stock.
The last wild quagga was probably shot in the late 1870s, and the last specimen in captivity, a mare, died on August 12, 1883 at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam. Recent genetic research at the Smithsonian Institution has demonstrated that the quagga was in fact not a separate species at all, but diverged from the extremely variable plains zebra, Equus burchelli, between 120,000 and 290,000 years ago, and suggests that it should be named Equus burchelli quagga.
As the quagga was described about thirty years earlier than the plains zebra, it appears that the correct terms are E. quagga burchelli for the plains zebra, unless "Equus burchelli" is officially declared to be a nomen conservandum.
Quagga specimen at Natural History Museum, London.
After the very close relationship between the quagga and surviving zebras was discovered, the Quagga Project was started by Reinhold Rau in South Africa to recreate the quagga by selective breeding from plains zebra stock, with the eventual aim of reintroducing them to the wild.
In addition to skins such as the one held by the Natural History Museum in London, there are 23 known stuffed and mounted quagga throughout the world. A twenty-fourth specimen was destroyed in Königsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad), during World War II.
Quagga hybrids and similar animals
Zebras have been cross-bred to other equines such as donkeys and horses.
Zebroids are often exhibited as curiosities although some are broken to harness or as riding animals. He most resembles the quagga.
There is a record of a quagga bred to a horse in the 1896 work Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M.
Pyle:
In the year 1815 Lord Morton put a male quagga to a young chestnut mare of seven-eighths Arabian blood, which had never before been bred from. The result was a female hybrid which resembled both parents.
In his 1859 The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin recalls seeing coloured drawings of zebra-donkey hybrids, and mentions "Lord Moreton's famous hybrid from a chesnut mare and male quagga..." Darwin mentioned this particular hybrid again in 1868 in The Variation Of Animals And Plants Under Domestication, and provides a citation to the journal in which Lord Morton first described the breeding.
Okapi markings are nearly the reverse of the quagga, with the forequarters being mostly plain and the hindquarters being heavily striped.
However, the okapi is no relation of the quagga, horse, donkey, or zebra. Its closest taxonomic relative is the giraffe.
In popular culture
A quagga appears in a sequence in the Soviet Union's animated The Cat Who Walked by Herself, in which Dog tracks the hoofprints of one, and Cat tells the boy of the Red Book of endangered species, and how Quagga had "her track severed" (that is, made extinct) due to Man's selfish actions.
A Quagga is one of the main characters in The Katurran Odyssey, a fantasy children's book by David Michael Wieger.
The Quagga has had a part in the book Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox, by author Eoin Colfer, where the protagonist, Artemis Fowl, is made to ride a Quagga in his attempts to flee the clutches of an evil pixie genius, Opal Koboi.
The Quagga can be unlocked in the computer game Zoo Tycoon 2.
Once unlocked, it will become available at Challenge and Campaign games at 1.5 stars in Zoo Tycoon 2
The Quagga is also seen in the book Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel when a stuffed specimen was found on the abandoned airship Hyperion.
The Quagga is mentioned in Jurassic Park as one of the animals that could be recreated by InGen or Biosyn using DNA extracted from the hides of the Quagga.
In King Solomon's Mines by H.