Once upon a time in South Africa there existed a zebra-like animal called the quagga, which has been extinct since the late nineteenth century. It had stripes only on its head, neck, shoulders, and part of its trunk; the rest of its body was a light chestnut brown in color, or sometimes yellowish-red, and its legs were white. Its mane was dark brown with pale stripes, and a broad dark line ran down the middle of its back. It was as though nature had intended the quagga to be a zebra but had given up the job halfway through.
When the nomad huntsmen known as the Hottentots were the only inhabitants of the South African plains, the quagga was a common animal there, grazing in herds of twenty to forty. The Hottentot name for it was quahkah, from the sound of its barking neigh. When the first Boers—Dutch settlers—arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, they adopted the name, spelling it quagga. (The Boers called regular zebras bontequagga, meaning “the quagga with conspicuous stripes.”)
Soon large-scale quagga-hunting began. The Boers had no use for quagga meat themselves—they regarded it as a kind of horse, and Europeans have never been eager eaters of horseflesh—but they killed them as food for the Hottentots, whom they had enslaved, and used quagga hides for making leather shoes and sacks for the storage of grain, dried fruits, and dried meat. The quaggas vanished very quickly before this onslaught: by 1870 the last wild herd had been entirely exterminated. From time to time in the first half of the twentieth century isolated quagga sightings were reported in remote parts of South Africa, but none was ever verified, and even these dubious reports ceased after 1940. A few quaggas did survive in Europe for a couple of decades beyond the 1870 extinction date, having been been brought there as curiosities by collectors of unusual animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But offspring among the captive quaggas were rare, and the last male quagga in Europe died in 1864. The Berlin Zoo’s one female died in 1875, and another, the last of her species, expired at the Amsterdam Zoo in 1883.
The quagga has figured in literature at least twice. Thomas Pringle, a nineteenth-century Scottish poet, mentioned it in his “Afar in the Desert,” speaking of the “timorous quagga’s shrill whistling neigh” that was “heard by the fountain at twilight grey.” And in 1973 I myself wrote of it in a novella called “Born with the Dead,” which is about a society of the near future in which a process has been developed to revive newly dead human beings. The revivees form a strange subculture of their own, completely outside normal human life, and among their amusing pastimes is to take part in African safaris where they hunt formerly extinct animals that have been brought back into existence by genetic manipulation. This is how I describe a quagga hunt:
“At first no one perceives anything unusual. But then, yes, Sy-bille hears it: a shrill barking neigh, very strange, a cry out of lost time, the cry of some beast they have never known. It is a song of the dead. There, among the zebras, are half a dozen animals that might almost be zebras, but are not—unfinished zebras, striped only on their heads and foreparts. . . . Now and again they lift their heads, emit that weird percussive whistling snort, and bend to the grass again. Quaggas. Strays out of the past, relicts, rekindled spectres. . . .” The hunt goes well. A quagga is killed, skinned, served for dinner that night. “The meat is juicy, robust, faintly tangy.” In the next few days my ex-dead characters see such animals as giant ground sloths and moas in the game park, and eventually they go on to hunt passenger pigeons, aurochs, and even a dodo.
What I didn’t know, back there in 1973, was that a South African taxidermist named Reinhold Rau was already seriously thinking of trying to bring the quagga back from extinction. I was simply writing a science fiction story, inventing whatever details I needed to carry my story along, but Reinhold Rau had as his goal the actual and literal resurrection of a vanished species.
Rau first encountered a quagga—a stuffed one—in 1959, when he took a job as a taxidermist at Capetown’s natural history museum. Something about that quagga moved him deeply. He saw it as a victim of man’s ignorance and greed, and, as he said many years later, he felt that it was his duty—his destiny, even—to “reverse this disaster.”
Rau was aware—I knew about it too when I wrote my story—that in the 1920s German zoologists had attempted to recreate the extinct European bison known as the aurochs by selective breeding of modern kinds of cattle, choosing for their breeding stock those that most resembled the aurochs in physique and the color of their fur. In time they produced animals that indeed looked something like the aurochs, although they were not, of course, the true item. Rau wondered whether quagga genes lurked in modern-day zebras and could perhaps be brought together by a similar breeding program that would in time arrive at what would be, in effect, an authentic quagga.
That would be unlikely to achieve if quaggas and zebras had indeed been separate species, so far apart genetically that interbreeding in the days before the quagga’s extinction would have been impossible. But Rau didn’t think that was so. He knew from their terminology for the animals that the early Boer settlers had regarded quaggas and zebras as nothing more than different varieties of the same creature, and was convinced, in a purely intuitive way, that the quagga must have differed from the zebra only in the pattern of its striping and in some superficial charac- teristics of body shape, not in any profound genetic way. He began his project, just about the time I was writing “Born With the Dead,” by studying mounted quagga specimens in various museums—there are twenty-three of them, mostly in Europe—to get a precise idea of what the quagga had actually looked like. (He discovered that it had differed considerably from zebras in ways other than the pattern of stripes, having a straighter back and a more forward-jutting head. But he still believed that the animals had been closely related and might even have been capable of interbreeding.) When he tried to find institutional support for his breeding program, though, he had no success, and was about to abandon the scheme when, in 1981, he heard from Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo, who was collecting blood and skin samples of zebras in an attempt to understand the genetic variations among various zebra populations, and who hoped that Rau, in his capacity as a taxidermist, could help him out.
Rau replied that he had something even more interesting than zebra material: specimens of actual quagga tissue. (He had acquired small bits of quagga muscle and blood vessels in 1969 when he remounted the badly stuffed specimen at the Capetown museum.) From these Ryder was able to extract DNA samples, a feat that gave Michael Crichton the notion of reconstituting dinosaurs from their DNA that became the seed of the novel Jurassic Park. Ryder went on to indicate support for Rau’s belief that the quagga had been only a variant kind of zebra, not a distinct species. This reawakened in Rau the hope that it might be possible to breed the quagga back into existence using relatively quagga-like zebras.
He began the experiment in 1986 with a group of zebras provided by the Namibian parks service, supplemented with a second batch captured a year later in a different area of southern Africa. The early results were not encouraging. Most members of the first two zebra batches were visibly striped both fore and aft, and so were their offspring. But Rau located some lightly striped zebras in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa and added them to the genetic mix, and this time things began to happen.
Rau’s quagga enterprise ended with his death at the age of seventy-three in February 2006, but by that time he had come to preside over a herd of more than one hundred animals, scattered through a number of private game reserves in the Capetown area. Biologically they all must be considered zebras, of course. But some are quite quagga-like in appearance. That does not, sad to say, make them true quaggas: they are just zebras with quaggoid striping patterns. The prize of the herd, whom Rau called “Henry,” is zebra-striped from head to rib-cage, but then the stripes begin to fade out, and the rear half of his body is yellowish-brown, with only a few faint stripes visible on his hindquarters. That does not make him a real quagga, but, all the same, he is as close to a quagga in appearance as anything the world has seen since Amsterdam’s captive female died a century and a quarter ago.
Most likely Reinhold Rau would not have been able to carry his quagga-revival project much beyond the point he had attained at the time of his death. Through decades of dedicated work he managed to breed a race of what are, essentially, zebras with defective striping, which is not quite the same thing as bringing an extinct species back to life. There is hope, though, that new advances in DNA research will permit further genetic modification leading to the creation of something that is more like an actual quagga. The samples of quagga DNA that Rau was able to collect from the skins of the stuffed zoo specimens are of high quality, and it should be possible through close analysis to isolate the specific genetic signposts of quagganess and to distinguish them from zebra genes. Then, perhaps, a program of genetic repair might be employed to edit the zebra genes of Rau’s animals into quagga genes, producing, eventually, a creature more or less like an authentic quagga. (In case you’re wondering why the cloning process used to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park can’t be employed to speed the quagga quest, let me remind you that Jurassic Park is only science fiction, and that the DNA that has been retrieved from specimens of extinct animals thus far is too badly degraded to be used in cloning experiments.)
For that matter my story “Born with the Dead” is still only science fiction, too, nearly thirty-five years after I wrote it and a decade or so beyond the future year in which I set it. Not only don’t we have any method for bringing dead human beings back to life or even a glimmer of it on the horizon, but there’s no sign out there of the possibility that my rekindled deads will be able to go off to African game parks to hunt dodos, moas, giant ground sloths, or quaggas. I did indeed have them hunting quaggas in that story of long ago, though, which is why it gave me such a shiver to learn that Reinhold Rau, all unbeknownst to me, had actually spent nearly four decades striving to restore the quagga to our world. This is not a case of life imitating art, since Rau’s research and my speculative idea were simultaneously generated in complete independence of each other. But it can, I suppose, be considered an example of parallel evolution.
