Did scientists revive an extinct animal or just breed a less stripey zebra?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. CAPE TOWN, South Africa—If it looks like a quagga, gallops like a quagga and barks like a quagga, then it probably is a quagga. Or is it? Scientists and conservationists here say they’ve brought a zebralike mammal back from the dead, giving the quagga a major win over the more-famous Woolly mammoth and Dodo bird in the global race to bring animals back from extinction.
But not everyone is celebrating. Detractors of the nearly four-decade quest insist it has produced nothing more than a skin-deep knockoff. “They’re effectively just making a zebra less stripey," said Douglas McCauley, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Quaggas were once endemic to southern Africa, but aggressive hunting decimated their population and the last known quagga died at the Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Unlike zebras, quaggas only had stripes on their heads, necks and sometimes backs. Their hindquarters were generally stripeless and brown while their belly and legs were white.
The name quagga, with the g’s pronounced with a guttural “ch," is an onomatopoeic imitation of the shrill, barking sound the animal made. In the early 1980s, the quagga became the first extinct animal whose DNA was sequenced, paving the way for other modern de-extinction efforts. Some scientists thought that the quagga, a subspecies of the most common type of zebra, could be brought back through selective breeding.
While cloning creates an exact replica of an individual animal, rebreeding creates an entire population, with a more natural genetic variation. Only a subspecies can be rebred. The Quagga Project, a nonprofit founded in 1987, acquired zebras with lighter, sparser or browner stripes to
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