Last quagga died - August 12, 1883

On this day in 1883, the last quagga died in a zoo in Amsterdam. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, Welcome to This Day in History Class,
where we dust off a little piece of history every day.
Today is August tween. The day was August three. The

(00:27):
quagga went extinct when the last one in captivity died
at a zoo in Amsterdam. The quaga was a subspecies
of plains zebra that lived in South Africa, though it
was initially believed to be its own species. It had
stripes like other zebras, but it's brown and white stripes

(00:48):
were limited mainly to the front of its body. At
the back of the quaga's body, the stripes faded into
a solid brown or tan colored coat. Its legs and
tail were also not striped, and they were light in color.
The name quagga was based on the sound of the
animals call. Once Europeans began colonizing South Africa, they started

(01:13):
hunting quagas. They shot and killed quagas for sport, for food,
and for their coats. They also captured some to herd
sheep and shipped some out of the country to be
displayed in zoos. Because the animals were so skittish in
high energy, some farmers used them as guards, and some

(01:33):
pulled carriages. In the early eighteen hundreds in England, the
vegetation that quags eight was also food for domesticated livestock,
so quagas were considered competitors of sheep, goats, and other animals.
The colonists valued the quagas had been sent to zoos.
Breeding programs were unsuccessful. Quagas were most likely extinct in

(01:57):
the wild by the late eighteen seventies, and on August twelfth,
eighteen eighty three, the last quagga and captivity a mayor
held at Amsterdam's the Toda artist Magistro Zoo, died. She
had been living there since May of eighteen sixty seven.
The cause of her death is unknown. At the time,

(02:18):
people did not realize that her death signified the extinction
of the subspecies, perhaps because so many people used the
word quagga to refer to all zebras. Only twenty three
stuffed quagga mounted quagga body parts, seven quagga skeletons, and
samples of quagga tissue remain. The quagga was the first

(02:41):
animal that was declared extinct to have his DNA analyzed,
which is what led to the conclusion that it was
a subspecies of plains zebra. Scientists determined that some of
the quagga jeans might still be present in Plaines zebra today.
In nineteen eighty seven, the Quagga Project was launched in
South Africa. The project is an attempt to bring the

(03:04):
quagga back from extinction using selective breeding from nineteen zebras
that had fewer stripes on their hind quarters and had
other quagga characteristics. Quagga bread from these planes zebras can
have coat patterns that closely resemble those of extinct quagas.

(03:24):
The first rebred quagga was born in nineteen and the
project aims to have hundreds of quagga like zebras and
multiple free ranging populations. Some researchers have argued that quagga
might have had distinct, non morphological genetically coded characteristics, so

(03:45):
a selective breeding program could not create a real quagga
and there's no guarantee that they'd have the same habits
and behaviors of the estate quagga. But the scientists at
the Quagga Project say the animals with the same appearance,
form and structure of the extinct Quagga can justifiably be

(04:05):
called quaggas. I'm Eve, Jeff Code, and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at
T D i h C podcast. Thanks for joining me
on this trip through time. See you here in the

(04:28):
exact same spot tomorrow. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.