The Quagga
The only one of her kind ever photographed alive.
- EXISTED
- Until 1883
- WHERE
- The Karoo, South Africa
- LOST
- 12 August 1883
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Hunted for hide and meat; cleared as a rival to livestock
The quagga was a zebra that wore its stripes only on the front half of its body, fading to a plain warm brown behind, as though half-finished, or half-erased. It roamed the grasslands of South Africa in great herds until Dutch settlers, wanting the land for sheep and the hides for grain sacks, shot it out of existence in a few decades.
So little did anyone realise what was happening that the last wild quaggas were gone before the species was understood to be in danger. A single mare lived on in Amsterdam, dying in 1883; only five photographs of a living quagga were ever taken, all of one mare at London Zoo. By the time the world thought to want them back, there was nothing left but skins, bones, and those five fading pictures.
A lone mare died at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam on 12 August 1883. Her keepers, awaiting a replacement that would never come, did not know she was the last quagga on earth.