7 - Afterlife

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.