One man's efforts to recreate the Quagga

In 1971, taxidermist Reinhold Rau realized that the quagga's genes had not been forever lost. Zebras had occasionally interbred with quagga over the millenniums, and some of the descendants of these pairings still roamed South Africa. Rau surmised that he could retrace evolution's trail by mating the most quagga-looking zebras he could find and then mating certain of the offspring. In each generation, quagga genes will be further concentrated—so that eventually, Rau believes, two zebras will produce a real quagga.
Rau seemed to be getting close with his this foal, Henry (left), a grandchild and a great-grandchild of his original zebras. Henry's coloring and his stripes—faint, narrow, and few—strongly resemble 19^th century quagga. Alas, some stripes still remain on Henry's hocks, where quagga didn't have them. But one can imagine that one of Henry's children could be a full-fledged quagga. Reinhold Rau died in 2006, but his work is still carried on by The Quagga Project South Africa at www.quaggaproject.org
The morphological variability within living plains zebras and the extinct quagga. Upper row, left: mare ‘Tracy’ from the quagga rebreeding program, probably the most quagga-like living plains zebra; middle: a plains zebra from the Etosha area; right: E. b. boehmi, a subspecies with very pronounced striping and no brown coloration or shadow-stripes in the white parts. Lower row, left: Munich quagga, one of the specimens with the least striping; right: Tring quagga, one of the unquestioned quagga specimens with the most pronounced striping.

Although previous genetic analyzes have suggested that the quagga was genetically similar to plains zebras in mitochondrial DNA sequence (Higuchi et al. 1984, 1987), not all species of zebra were included in the comparison and genetic diversity in the quagga remained unknown. Morphological analyzes of the quagga and all other zebra species have come to conflicting conclusions. In a study based on cranial measurements, the quagga was found to be as different from plains zebra as the plains zebra is from the mountain zebra (Klein & Cruz-Uribe 1999). Another study, based on pelage as well as cranial characters, found the quagga and the plains zebra to be highly similar and argued for subspecific status of the quagga (Groves & Bell 2004).

Paul, compare the Tring quagga's markings to the marking of the mutated zebra we both thought might be a zebra/horse cross.