[Photo: Twitter/@QuaggaProject]



It’s a horse! It’s a zebra! No, wait, it’s both!

Scientists at South Africa’s The Quagga Project have reintroduced a long-extinct subspecies of the zebra back to the plains it once roamed. As of today, six quaggas – or as we like to call them “extra funky zebras” – are doing their quagga thing on a reserve with plans to create at least 50 more through selective breeding.

European settlers initially hunted quaggas, which look like zebras but with stripes only appearing on the front half of their bodies, to extinction during the 1800s. Now, after several generations of breeding by The Quagga Project, which was started in 1987 out of Cape Town University, the “Rau quaggas” named after project founder Reinhold Rau are ready to roam.

“The project is aimed at rectifying a tragic mistake made over a hundred years ago through greed and short sightedness,” explains the project’s website. “It is hoped that if this revival is successful, in due course herds showing the phenotype of the original quagga will again roam the plains of the Karoo.”

But the project has faced some criticism.

Ben Novak, a scientist with Revive and Restore – which aims to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species – says he’s been following the quagga project for 16 years.

“It was originally a big inspiration for me when I first began contemplating how de-extinction could work and be used for conservation,” says Novak.

Unfortunately, the project hasn’t bred a quagga so much as a look-alike.

“The Rau quagga does not possess the genetic variability that was unique to the extinct quagga,” he says. “While Rau quagga meet the project team’s statistical definition of quagga coloration – none of them possess the deep chocolate brown coloration that made the quagga completely unique among zebras.”

Novak, who did two years of post-graduate work at McMaster University – home of the Ancient DNA Centre – has been spearheading “The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback” for Revive and Restore.

The goal of the project is to bring back the passenger pigeons that used to call North America home but went extinct 100 years ago. To do so, scientists will take DNA from the footpad of a stuffed passenger bird at the ROM and mix it with the DNA of a closely related, extant species called the band-tailed pigeon.

“Major steps forward in primordial germ cell culturing methods are needed to open up genome editing technologies to create extinct birds,” says Novak.

By comparing and decoding the genome, they hope to use emergent technology to adjust the genes of the brand-tailed pigeon and create a flock of de-extinct passenger pigeons by 2023. The project follows similar ambitions by researchers at the Ancient DNA Centre in Hamilton to de-extinct the famed wooly mammoth, which disappeared four thousand years ago.

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[Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Images]



In April, McMaster evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, said the centre had made a breath through in sequencing the genome of two long-dead mammoth’s DNA.

“This basically gives you the changes that account for a mammoth being a mammoth — the changes that allowed them to have hair, tremendous amounts of fat, large tusks,” Hendrik Poinar, who directs the Ancient DNA Center at McMaster University, told CBS News. “This then gives us this road map, so to speak, of what we would need to change in an Asian elephant chromosome to make them mammoth-like.”

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