@biomedicalephemera / biomedicalephemera.tumblr.com
I’m finally catching up with the 30 day drawing challenge I promised myself I would do.
I’m on day 2 and 3, favorite animal and favorite food, respectively.
day 1
You know what? someone wanted quaggas. This is a quagga. Appreciate the quagga!
JUST FOR YOU ANON
"The Quaka" - 1804 aquatint, by Samuel Daniell
Stuffed Quagga at the London Natural History Museum
This is one of 23 skins/stuffed Quagga still in existence. There were 24, but the one kept at a museum in Kaliningrad, Germany, was destroyed during WWII. Several of the specimens, including this one, have had their DNA sampled and analyzed. From this analysis, it's been determined that the quagga and plains zebra species diverged between 120,000 and 290,000 years ago.
Quagga Stallion
Water colour painting on vellum parchment, by Nicolas Marechal, painted in Paris in 1793. This stallion was a member of the menagerie "herd" at Versailles, during the reign of Louis XVI. Unfortunately, the only female quagga in the herd lived there years before the stallion, and he never produced foals.
Quagga Mare - The only photograph of her kind
This 1870 photograph is of the quagga mare who resided at the Regent's Park Zoo in London. She died not long after being photographed, and a few years later, the last wild quagga was shot. In 1883 in Amsterdam, the last captive quagga died. Only 100 years after being recognized as a separate species from the other zebras of South Africa, the species was extinct.
