Is The Quagga Coming Back?

The other day, I got mail from Bobs & Bitz. It was a spread from a weekly German newspaper about extinct animals. The lovely Beaverhausen ladies had sent it to my attention because of the animal series at produzentin.com.

As my favourite extinct animal the Tasmanian Tiger (aka Beutelwolf) was featured in the article, I thought I should feature it too. But then, I saw the quagga:

One of only 5 existing pictures of a living quagga (source)

I already hear you saying: produzentin, are you kiddin’ us? This is just an okapi with the stripes on backwards! Or it’s a zorse! Don’t be foolin’ us, please!
Hold on, hold on, dear readers: The quagga is fo’ real. It has a close relation to the zebra, whereas the closest relative to the okapi is the giraffe. We have to get that family tree straightened out, right?

Anyways, the quagga lived in South Africa and is extinct since 1883. But this is not the end of the story. The Quagga Project aims to reproduce the quagga through back breeding of specific zebra stock. I can’t wait for the quagga to come back.

More on the quagga.

When Do We Get Zo-ger or Li-rse?

Hybrids caught my attention when I watched Napoleon Dynamite drawing a liger. The cross between a male lion and a female tiger is pretty much Napoleon’s favourite animal. Supposedly, they are the biggest cats in the world. I’m really intrigued by the whole wiki entry on ligers:

While male ligers are sterile, female ligers are fertile, and they can reproduce. Because only female ligers and tigons are fertile, a liger cannot reproduce with a tigon.
If a liger were to reproduce with a tiger, it would be called a ti-liger, and if it were to reproduce with a lion, it would be called a li-liger.

Napoleon’s drawing of a liger

Recently, I discovered the Zorse, you guessed it, a cross between a zebra stallion and a horse mare. An extremely hybrid Zorse called Eclyse lives at Safaripark Stukenbrock near Bielefeld, Germany.
Of course there is a video of Eclyse. Watch it, please.

A Zorse named Eclyse
After the mother Eclipse and the father Ulysses