My kingdom for a quagga

 

- Daniell´s Quagga? Yeah, I vaguely remember him, 
annoying as heck, always tried to steal the best grass!

When I was a kid, Swedish school dictionaries only contained two words beginning with the letter Q. One was quisling. The other was quagga (spelled "qvagga"). That´s a kind of zebra. These days, the Quagga is no longer classified as a separate species, but as a subspecies of the Plains Zebra (which is somewhat confusingly known in Latin as Equus quagga). Confusingly, since the "real" Quagga is extinct! 

Below, I link to two blog posts by Karl Shuker, who had some fun trying to track down information about two freak specimens of the Quagga once assumed to represent entirely new species. Apparently, it wasn´t easy! Today, Daniell´s Quagga and the Isabella Quagga are only known from illustrations in old books. 

Fun fact: when I asked Bing AI to generate a picture of a Quagga, it produced pictures of perfectly plain zebras instead. So yeah, the Quagga does seem to be extinct, alright. Maybe next time, I´ll ask the AI to make a picture of a quisling instead... 

The Isabella Quagga - a long-lost, long-forgotten equine enigma

Daniell´s Quagga and Ward´s Zebra - another two striped curiosities of the equine kind