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7 - Afterlife

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2022

Peter Heywood
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

|Xam told stories in which quaggas were cast as sentient beings with families, some of which were quite dysfunctional. |Xam narratives explain their stripes and brown coloration, their fear of humans, and their behavior when hunted. While they existed, they gathered little attention from Europeans apart from featuring in accounts of explorers and hunters; they appeared in two poems by Thomas Pringle and were the focus of Lord Morton’s account of telegony. Few extinct animals, however, have had such an eventful afterlife as quaggas: in the last eighty years they have featured in stories, poems, paintings, and a film, and they were the first extinct organism to have their DNA sequenced. Similarities between quagga genomes and those of plains zebras show that these animals are conspecific and so all plains zebras now have the binomial name of Equus quagga; nonetheless, there are genetic differences between quaggas and other plains zebras. Quaggas live on symbolically in the coat of arms of the Western Cape province, and as an example of anthropogenic extinction.

Type
Chapter
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The Life, Extinction, and Rebreeding of Quagga Zebras
Significance for Conservation
, pp. 101 - 125
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Afterlife
  • Peter Heywood, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Life, Extinction, and Rebreeding of Quagga Zebras
  • Online publication: 30 April 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108917735.008
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  • Afterlife
  • Peter Heywood, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Life, Extinction, and Rebreeding of Quagga Zebras
  • Online publication: 30 April 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108917735.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterlife
  • Peter Heywood, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Life, Extinction, and Rebreeding of Quagga Zebras
  • Online publication: 30 April 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108917735.008
Available formats
×