Quagga

Quagga Equus quagga

Description

A partially striped wild horse, Equus quagga, native to southern Africa, that became extinct near the end of the 19th century. Quagga skin was used to produce an imitation sealskin leather. As DNA tests recently proved the quagga was actually a variant of the plains zebra, recent effors to 'breed-bac' the species have been positive. There are hopes to eventually release the new variat into the wild. There are 23 known specimens of stuffed and mounted quagga in the world. Okapi have the opposite markings with a solid color head and chest while the rear and legs are striped.

Synonyms and Related Terms

kwagga; okapi; kvagga (Ces., Sven.); Quagga (Deut., Esp., It., Port.); quaggazebra (Ned.); kwagga (Pol.);

Resources and Citations

• Matt Roberts, Don Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: a Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1982

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quagga (accessed Mar. 10, 2006)

• Random House, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Grammercy Book, New York, 1997

• The American Heritage Dictionary or Encarta, via Microsoft Bookshelf 98, Microsoft Corp., 1998