The Quagga
Nineteenth century specimen
In a darkened room on the top floor of the Grande Galerie, lit like a chapel, stand the animals that humans have driven to extinction or to the edge of it. Among them is a quagga, a creature that looks like a zebra that has only been half painted. Its head and neck carry bold dark stripes, but they fade along the body until the hindquarters are plain brown, and the legs are white. The quagga was a subspecies of the plains zebra that lived in enormous herds on the grasslands of South Africa until Dutch and British settlers shot them for meat and hides. The last wild ones were gone by the 1870s, and the very last quagga died in Amsterdam Zoo in 1883.
Only a couple of dozen mounted quaggas survive in the whole world, and the Paris specimen is one of the best. Look at the mane, which stands upright like a brush, and the ears, shorter than a horse's. Nineteenth century taxidermists had never seen a living quagga in the wild, so the pose is a little stiff, but the skin itself, with its gradient of stripes, is exactly what makes the animal precious. Genetic analysis of hairs from museum specimens like this one proved in the 1980s that the quagga was a form of plains zebra rather than a separate species.
That discovery inspired a breeding programme in South Africa that selects plains zebras with reduced striping to recreate the quagga's appearance. Whether the result is a quagga is debated, but the animals in this room are the reason the debate exists. The dodo, the thylacine and the great auk keep the quagga company here, each one a species that lived, was noticed, and was lost within recorded history.
Did You Know? The quagga was the first extinct animal to have its DNA studied, using tissue from a museum skin, in 1984.
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