TARPAN
When was it declared extinct?
The last pure-bred tarpan was discovered in 1887.
Where did it spend its time?
The tarpan was originally from the Central Asian steppes.
(Tarpan—During the breeding season, a pair of tarpan stallions fight. This tough animal is widely regarded as the ancestor of most modern horses.)
It may surprise you, but the domestication of the horse is one of the most significant events in human history. This seemingly insignificant event forever altered the way we lived. It allowed our forefathers to travel quickly over vast distances, and they used the strength and tenacity of these animals to perform tasks that previously required several men. When the horse's useful life was over, its flesh provided sustenance, and its skin, bones, and sinews were put to a variety of uses.
What happened to the first domestic horses? What were they, how did they live, and where did they come from? It is widely assumed that the tarpan was the ancestor of the majority of modern horses. The sturdy horse was only about 1.5 m tall at the shoulder and thus very small in comparison to a modern Thoroughbred racehorse. What the tarpan lacked in size, it made up for in resilience and stamina. It was able to survive in the harsh conditions that sometimes swept over these treeless plains because it was an animal of the Asian steppes. Its greyish brown coat grew long in the winter to provide extra protection from the cold. The tarpan may have even been white in some of its northernmost range. According to some Evenk people, ivory hunters searching for mammoth tusks in Siberia's deep permafrost would frequently come across white horses. It's possible that these were white tarpan that ended up in a bog before becoming encased in ice as the earth entered another of its many glaciations.
The tarpan, like other horses, was a grazer and a herd animal. The tarpan, like many other
fleetfooted animals, found protection from predators by living in a herd. Long ago, many different predators prowled the Asian steppe, many of which were perfectly capable of catching and subduing an animal as large as the tarpan. The tarpan's predators died off one by one, leaving only the wolf, the occasional bear, and, of course, humans. According to all accounts, the tarpan was a very spirited animal capable of defending itself by kicking and biting. Humans are known to have killed the tarpan by driving herds of them off cliffs, a surefire way of quickly killing a large number of them.
Horses are depicted in many cave paintings across Europe, and it is very likely that the tarpan and its relatives were simply hunted before an ancient innovator decided it would be a good idea to try to tame them. Hunting these animals on the steppes must have been difficult because horses have excellent smell and hearing and can detect danger before it is visible. When the domestication breakthrough occurred, hunting on the back of a tame tarpan became much easier, and the species began its slow, inexorable slide towards extinction. The primary issue confronting this species was not hunting. As people became aware of the tarpan's utility, more and more would have been taken from the wild to supplement the young raised by tame individuals. The domesticated tarpan population grew, and over time, their distinguishing characteristics, such as aggression and spiritedness, were refined through selective breeding to produce a horse that was calm and cooperative. These creatures were more akin to horses than tarpan. As people became aware of the tarpan's utility, more and more would have been taken from the wild to supplement the young reared by tame individuals. The domesticated tarpan population grew, and over time, their distinguishing characteristics, such as aggression and spiritedness, were filtered out in the process of selective breeding to produce a horse that was calm and cooperative. These animals resembled horses more than tarpan.
In a futile attempt to resurrect the tarpan, the Polish government gathered a number of ponies thought to have tarpan characteristics. These animals were taken from their peasant owners and placed in forest reserves. The ponies they chose were the result of millennia of selective breeding, and they were no more purebred tarpan than a German Shepherd dog is a purebred wolf. The same German scientists who believed it was possible to resurrect the aurochs turned their attention to selective breeding to resurrect the tarpan. This notion lacked credibility because no one knew or knows what constitutes the tarpan on a genetic level. In a futile attempt to resurrect the tarpan, the Polish government gathered a number of ponies thought to have tarpan characteristics. These animals were taken from their peasant owners and placed in forest reserves. The ponies they chose were the result of millennia of selective breeding, and they were no more purebred tarpan than a German Shepherd dog is a purebred wolf. The same German scientists who believed it was possible to resurrect the aurochs turned their attention to selective breeding to resurrect the tarpan. This notion lacked credibility because no one knew or knows what constitutes the tarpan on a genetic level.
The story of the tarpan is intriguing because it is not simply a case of a species becoming extinct. We took the tarpan and moulded it to our own needs, producing something quite distinct as a result of our desire to create an animal that would be useful to us. The tarpan our forefathers knew is no longer with us in a form they would recognize, but its genes can be found in almost every horse's cell.
• Scientists have been piecing together the story of horse evolution for a long time, and they now have several important pieces of the puzzle. The horse's first clear ancestor, Hyracotherium, evolved around 10 million years after the dinosaurs died out in North America. This animal, about the size of a fox, had four of its five digits in contact with the ground, and adaptations for running, such as long, thin legs, were already visible. Over millennia, these primitive horses gradually evolved into the modern horse, with the distinguishing feature of having only one digit in contact with the ground, making them fleet-footed plains animals.
• Today, Przewalski's horse, a sturdy, pony-sized animal that roams the Mongolian wilderness, is the only surviving truly wild horse. This horse was on the verge of extinction as well, but captive specimens enabled a breeding and reintroduction programmer that has returned a small number of these animals to the wild.
QUAGGA
When was it declared extinct?
In 1883, the last quagga, a captive specimen, died.
Where did it spend its time?
The quagga could only be found in South Africa, specifically in the Cape Province and the southern Orange Free State.
(The quagga is a plains zebra subspecies that retains some striping.)
The quagga, like the dodo, is one of the more well-known animals to have become extinct in recent years. Surprisingly, this horse-like creature was wiped out before anyone could figure out what it was. Naturalists in the Victorian era were encouraged to describe new species wherever and whenever possible, and the African zebra received considerable attention from these early taxonomists. Zebras differ greatly in size, color, and patterning, and these subtle differences were thought to represent subspecies or even distinct species. With the advent of molecular biology and DNA sequencing, it became clear that the gentleman scholars of the previous age had proposed had little validity. Recently, scientists were able to isolate DNA from mounted quagga skins that can be found in museums all over the world. It was discovered that the quagga was most likely a subspecies of the plains zebra and not a separate species at all.
Between 120,000 and 290,000 years ago, the plains zebra population in South Africa became isolated from the rest of their species, and they began to look slightly different. The main distinction between the quagga and the plains zebra is the coat. Live quagga specimens only had obvious stripes on their head and neck, but even the 23 specimens in museums around the world show a lot of variation, with some specimens having more stripes than others. The unusual name "quagga" is derived from the Hottentot name for the animal, quahah, and is intended to mimic the animal's shrill cry. Aside from these details, quaggas lived in the same way that plains zebras do today in Sub-Saharan Africa. They lived in large herds and were frequently seen grazing with wildebeest, hartebeest, and ostriches. It has been proposed that grazing together provided these animals with greater protection from their main predator, the lion, due to a combination of their abilities: the birds' eyesight, the antelopes' sense of smell, and the quaggas' acute hearing. A lion would have been hard pressed to catch a healthy adult quaggas in such a cooperative group of animals, and it is very likely that lions caught very few healthy adult quaggas.
This defense worked well against lions, but not so well against the Boers, who were armed with horses and guns. As the Boers moved inland, they exterminated these massive herds of ungulates for food and their high-quality skins. Quaggas were also captured in real time and used for a variety of purposes. According to all accounts, the quagga was a very lively, high-strung animal, and the stallions were prone to fits of rage, so taming one of these animals must have been both interesting and nearly impossible. The quagga was sometimes kept as a guard horse to protect domestic livestock during the early days of the Boers' settlement of South Africa. Any intruder, whether a lion or a rustler, was subjected to the quagga's whinnying alarm and was almost certainly attacked by this tenacious horse. Some quaggas made their way to Europe, where they ended up in large zoos. The authorities at London Zoo thought a quagga breeding programmed would be a great idea; however, this quickly fell apart when the lone stallion lost its temper and bashed itself to death against the enclosure wall. Regardless of the quagga's spirited nature, it appears that quaggas were popular as harness animals, and the cobblestone streets of 1830s London rang out to the sounds of their cantering hooves. It's unclear how they were persuaded to pull a carriage full of genteel Londoners, but they were most likely gelded beforehand.
The Boers, like the British before them, were quick to tame South Africa's verdant lands, which were rich in game and opportunity. South Africa's indigenous tribes fought the invaders but were forced to abandon their prime territories. The abundant South African wildlife was mercilessly destroyed by Europeans, not only for food and skins, but also for recreation and to make way for agriculture. One of the casualties of this onslaught was the quagga. Great herds of quaggas and other animals roamed South Africa in the 1840s, but only 30 years later, in 1878, the last wild quagga was shot. The last quagga, a female, died in Amsterdam's Artis Magistra Zoo in 1883. Today, the only places where you can see this South African wildlife are in national parks.
• The plains zebra has six recognized subspecies. The quagga and Burchell's zebra are now extinct, and the other subspecies have lost much of their habitat due to human encroachment. Despite declining numbers, zebras can still be seen in large numbers in Sub-Saharan national parks.
• Animal breeders are attempting to resurrect the quagga, as they have done with the tarpan and the aurochs, by selectively breeding from living zebras that have quagga characteristics.
Such an exercise is completely pointless, and the resources required for such programmed would be far better spent protecting the remaining zebras.
• According to quagga DNA analysis, this subspecies separated from the plains zebra between 120,000 and 290,000 years ago. If correct, this is a remarkably short time for the differences seen in the quagga's outward appearance to evolve. Perhaps a population of plains zebra became completely isolated in South Africa and began to evolve on its own. This is the beginning of speciation, the process by which one species splits into two over thousands or millions of years. The quagga had almost lost the distinctive coat of the plains zebra after less than 300,000 years, and if it had been allowed to survive for thousands more years, it would have continued to diverge until it was a distinct species in its own right.
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