New Life For A Vanished Zebra? - efforts to breed the 'extinct' quagga zebra in South Africa

International Wildlife, March, 1999

In 1975, Rau began his great experiment, sending letters to some of South Africa's leading zoologists and conservationists to outline his plan. Most, Rau believes, took one look at the letter and came to the same conclusion: "'This is all nonsense. How can you rebreed an extinct animal? And how dare somebody with no university education even involve himself in such discussions?'" Discouraged, but not dissuaded, Rau spent the next decade quietly gathering supporters. "He's like a bull terrier," says Hennie Heidenreich, a member of the project committee. "Once they've grabbed hold, they don't let go."

To quiet the naysayers, Rau needed proof that the plains zebra and quagga were indeed kissing cousins. In 1980, that suddenly became possible. Rau had taken leave from his job to remount three quaggas at a German museum. While there, he received a letter from Oliver Ryder, a specialist in equid genetics at the San Diego Zoo. Ryder was looking for zebra tissues to study. Rau offered him something much better: dried quagga flesh that he had recently sliced off a poorly prepared skin.

Ryder couldn't believe the quality of the century-old samples that arrived at his office. "It looked like jerky, almost," he marvels. In another stroke of luck, Ryder discovered that a biochemist with the University of California at Berkeley, Russell Higuchi, was eager to work with ancient DNA. In 1983, Higuchi made history when he became the first scientist to extract and clone a DNA segment from an extinct animal. This tiny fragment of the quagga's genetic code differed from horse genes in 12 locations, and from mountain zebra DNA in 10 places. Between the plains zebra and the quagga, however, there was not a single meaningful difference. So the quagga was the southernmost subspecies of the plains zebra. "The DNA evidence closes the case," observes Colin Groves, an equid taxonomy expert at the Australian National University.

A handful of holdouts still insists that the quagga could be a separate species. Few scientists will question the taxidermist's credentials today, however. "He's really responsible for discovering just about everything we know about quaggas in modern times," says Groves.

Finally, in March of 1986, Rau and a committee with expertise from the fields of zoology, livestock breeding, veterinary medicine, genetics and conservation launched the Quagga Breeding Project. Within months, Rau had traveled to Etosha National Park in neighboring Namibia. He inspected some 2,500 zebras over four days to select the nine brownest and barest animals. Later, he chose lightly striped breeding stock from South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province.

Today, progress is visible among the project's 56 animals, kept at five different sites. "Those animals in the green pines really look brown," says Rau, watching some mares on Table Mountain. "It's beautiful." In other herds, the project has bred zebras with pure white legs and almost stripeless rumps.

Back in his cluttered office at the museum, Rau points to a poster that he has assembled from 24 photographs of stuffed quaggas, arranged in six rows from least striped at the top to most striped at the bottom. He brags that the project's best animals already match the quaggas on the bottom row.