The Quagga: Half Horse … Half Zebra … Full Extinct!
The Equus quagga quagga, or essentially the Quagga, was a subspecies of Plains Zebra unique to the open grasslands of the Karoo region in South Africa.
Black News 
The Quagga Was a Subspecies of Plains Zebra with Stripes Only on the Front Half of Its Body.
The animal was Hunted to Extinction by 1883.
In fact, as the story goes, the Last Quagga reportedly died in an Amsterdam Zoo on August 12, 1883.
A Selective Breeding Programme Has Been Attempting to Recreate the species since 1987, without much success.
Okay, the last of the Quagga gave up ghost in Amsterdam nearly 145 years ago.
Photographs survive.
So does the DNA.
Equus quagga quagga, or essentially the Quagga, was a subspecies of Plains Zebra unique to the open grasslands of the Karoo region in South Africa.
Its appearance was striking and distinctive.
The front of the body, from head, neck, and shoulders was decorated with typical zebra black-and-white stripes.
However, the middle and rear of the body was progressively less striped, with the rump and legs entirely brown.
And the ultimate combination? Half-zebra, half-horse in appearance.
The extinction
European colonial hunters, settlers, and farmers killed Quaggas in enormous numbers throughout the 19th century for skins, meat, and to eliminate competition with domestic livestock for grazing.
The wild population was historically gone by the 1870s.
The last captive Quagga was a female being kept at Amsterdam’s Natura Artis Magistra zoo.
It however also died on August 12, 1883.
Her death was not initially recognized as the species’ extinction.
As it happens, the zoo officials assumed they could still acquire another Quagga from the wild.
Unfortunately, it later dawned on them that there were no more Quaggas … Anywhere in the world.
Remaining images
Five photographs of the same female Amsterdam Quagga were taken between 1864 and 1872.
These are regarded to be the only photographs ever taken of any living Quagga.
They form the entire visual historical record or the Zebra-Horse animal.
DNA:
In 1984, Russell Higuchi successfully extracted DNA from a Quagga museum specimen.
It was the first time that DNA had been extracted from an extinct species.
Analysis confirmed the Quagga was a subspecies of Plains Zebra (Equus quagga), not a separate species. Plains Zebra populations still exist; they carry the genetic ancestry of which the Quagga was a regional variant.
The Quagga Project
Beginning in 1987, South African researchers initiated a selective breeding programme using Plains Zebras with naturally reduced stripe patterns.
By 2024, several “Rau Quaggas” (named for project founder Reinhold Rau) have been bred.
They were selectively bred to resemble historic Quaggas.
These however, are not the original Quagga (whose specific genetic combination is lost) but represent the phenotype of reduced striping.
When the last individual of a subspecies dies and the world fails to notice until decades later.
