This quagga reveals its true striped pattern.
The scientist who claims to have brought back an extinct relative of the zebra is a diving expert, and while some think it's the equine equivalent of “Jurassic Park,” neighbors see it as a superficial imitation. I call it that.
“Effectively, we're just reducing the zebra's stripes,” said Douglas McCauley, an evolution expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. wall street journal While mocking the creation.
The animal in question is the quagga, which once roamed the great plains of Africa but was hunted to extinction. The last specimen, a mare, died in a zoo in Amsterdam in 1883.
This galloping herbivore resembled the barred one, but was more brown, with stripes only on the body and the first half of the head, reminding me of some kind of zebra rough draft.
In 1987, an avid Quagga fan quagga project, A campaign to bring the sepia-tinged zebra back from the dead thanks to advances in genetic sequencing technology is the first time the technology has been tried on an extinct creature, WSJ reported.
But instead of cloning the quagga, scientists tried to bring it back through “selective rebreeding,” or breeding compatible subspecies. You can think of this as the genetic equivalent of a painter mixing different colors on a palette to get the desired pigment.
After analyzing the DNA of a dead quagga foal, they discovered that it was genetically similar to the Southern Plains zebra, a close relative of the brown, sparsely striped zebra. I thought this was a good basis for Quagga's second coming.
The campaign was riddled with obstacles. Reinhold Rau, a German taxidermist integral to the Quagga project, died in 2006, putting some of their efforts in vain, although it took some time to see if the experiment would bear fruit.
For example, it takes two years to determine whether a foal has the required number of stripes, and stallions must be moved every five years to curb inbreeding.
Despite the difficulties, the researchers eventually created an anima (named Rau Quagga after the project's late godfather) that forever evoked the extinct anima.
“They're such good animals,” exclaimed March Turnbull, project coordinator for the Quagga Project, as he looked at the doppelgängers at Värgelegen, a wine farm near Cape Town that houses 10 animals.
Fortunately, aside from the aforementioned superficial criticism of zebras having fewer stripes, many people are starting to think that the ongoing woolly mammoth revival, which involves breeding elephants to be more cold-tolerant I felt that the reimagined Quagga was more effective than the initiative.
South African conservationist Stuart Pym, for example, thought this was an exercise in pure ego.
Molecular biologist Annelin Morozzi, who is working on the project, plans to sequence the genomes of the repopulated quaggas, which scientists believe will not only satisfy scientific curiosity but also “raise many questions. I believe that I can answer this question.
For example, Peter Heywood, a professor emeritus of biology at Brown University who has written about the rau quagga, says that even if the rau quagga is not identical to the real thing, the project could help repopulate the endangered animal. It is said that there is a possibility that there is a hidden blueprint for building it.
“They are symbols of hope,” he said.
