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Post by another specialist on Jul 24, 2009 17:44:46 GMT
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Post by Melanie on Nov 24, 2009 12:30:28 GMT
In the second of three posts, we focus on individual exhibits from the weird and wonderful collection of our Museum of the Month - the Grant Museum. Here we see the skeleton of a female quagga (Equus quagga quagga). This extinct form of zebra lived on the grassy plains of South Africa until the 1880s. Unlike common zebras, only their front third was stripy; the rest of their bodies were brown. Hunting for this unusual pelt was one of the reasons they were driven to extinction, another was competition with livestock for grazing pastures. The last known quagga died at Amsterdam Zoo on 12th August 1883 - it is one of the few animals for which the exact moment of extinction is known. The Grant Museum houses one of only seven quagga skeletons in existence - it is the rarest skeleton in the world. quagga_sketch.jpg The history of the Grant Museums' quagga is slightly embarrassing. They had two "zebras" listed on the museum's register. There was a rumour that one of them was in fact a quagga. In 1972 the world's quagga expert came to measure up the zebras against known anatomical features. To great fanfare, one of the "zebras" was upgraded to the ranks of world's rarest skeleton. The downside was that the second "zebra" turned out to be a donkey - a significant demotion in zoological terms. The Grant Museum's quagga only has three legs. The location of the fourth is uncertain. The most likely story is that the leg was on loan to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons during WW2. This building was bombed during the Blitz, and part of their collection was destroyed, including - it's believed - the quagga's leg. An alternative theory is also war related - the entire Grant Museum, along with the whole UCL Zoology Department, was evacuated to Bangor in Wales to avoid such damage as the Hunterian suffered. Unfortunately not all the specimens made it back after the war ended, and it is possible the leg was among the missing. Recent DNA studies on museum skin specimens (quagga skins are more common than skeletons - just over 20 are known) have shown that quaggas were not a distinct species but a sub-species of the plains zebra. The South African Museum in Cape Town is working on a project to selectively breed plains zebras with relatively few stripes on their hind-quarters, until the same colour pattern as the quagga is achieved: essentially they are attempting to breed the quagga back from extinction. Obviously, they wont actually ever manage to recreate the quagga, but they might, after a lot of time and money, end up with a zebra that isn't very stripy, and so looks like a quagga. The Grant Museum is open every week day between 1pm and 5pm. You can find it on UCL's main campus, with an entrance on Malet Place. londonist.com/2009/11/from_the_grant_museum_the_mystery_o.php |
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Post by RSN on Aug 22, 2011 18:56:08 GMT
 Walton Ford Sorry, I didn't found the full image. |
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Post by RSN on Sept 1, 2011 12:33:05 GMT
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Post by RSN on Sept 1, 2011 13:17:06 GMT
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Post by surroundx on Nov 19, 2013 10:21:47 GMT
The mystery of the species-hopping, three-legged quaggaIn 1972, a zoologist put two skulls on the table. One of them, he knew, had come from a male quagga that had lived and died at London Zoo. The other, as far as anyone knew, was just a regular female zebra. All was not as it seemed. Up until that moment, the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London had been the proud owner of two near-complete, articulated zebra skeletons. But there was a rumour passed down from curator to curator that one of them – affectionately known as Z581 – was, in fact, a quagga. To settle the matter, the skull of the Grant equid travelled across London to South Kensington to be placed under the expert eye of Alan Gentry, then curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum. After careful inspection, comparing the enigmatic Grant specimen with other zebras and the single quagga in the Natural History Museum collection, Gentry reached his conclusion: “Z581 can be taken quite safely as E. quagga,” he wrote. Read more: www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/18/the-mystery-of-the-species-hopping-three-legged-quagga
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Post by surroundx on Dec 14, 2013 7:47:51 GMT
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Post by surroundx on May 12, 2014 5:24:22 GMT
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Post by knobkerrie on Jun 27, 2014 0:48:52 GMT
Hi,
I have a 18th or 19th century South African hide shield that I am told is made from the hide of a quagga. Does anyone know how I confirm that and how I distinguish it from a common Zebra hide? Am happy to send images of the shield.
Thanks
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Post by Melanie on Jun 27, 2014 18:44:05 GMT
Hi, I have a 18th or 19th century South African hide shield that I am told is made from the hide of a quagga. Does anyone know how I confirm that and how I distinguish it from a common Zebra hide? Am happy to send images of the shield. Thanks Hi, welcome to the forum. Would be great to see these images. |
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Post by Peter on Jun 28, 2014 16:59:05 GMT
Hi Knobkerrie, would certainly great to see the images of your shield.
Does it contain less striping and a more brown colour?
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Post by surroundx on Jul 19, 2014 11:02:20 GMT
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Post by surroundx on Apr 19, 2015 3:15:48 GMT
A documentary about the Quagga and recreating them. Includes an interview with David Barnaby:
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Post by surroundx on Aug 2, 2015 4:39:52 GMT
Rebuilding the Rare Extinct Quagga with 3D Printing & ScanningA quagga looked like a cross between a zebra and a horse, and though there’s debate over whether a quagga was related to the plains zebra, some authorities have described the quagga as a kind of wild horse rather than a zebra. One thing is known, the quagga was perhaps the first extinct animal to have its DNA analyzed back in 1984, and those studies launched the field of ancient DNA analysis. London’s Grant Museum of Zoology just happens to have had an extremely rare, but neglected, quagga skeleton which was missing a leg and mislabeled as a zebra for many years. Now the remains of this rare zoological museum specimen – a species which was hunted to extinction in South Africa – is back on all four legs thanks to 3D printing. The restorers recreated the missing limb by scanning and flipping the existing right hind leg to replace the missing left leg, and Jack Ashby, the manager at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London, says it’s one of only seven quagga skeletons known to exist in the world. “Not only does it add a fantastic chapter to a specimen with so many stories, but the new leg also makes the whole skeleton more stable,” Ashby says. At one point, the quagga roamed the South African plains in large numbers, and they were easily identified by their half plain brown, half striped hide. It’s thought that the last of the beasts died in Amsterdam during the summer of 1883. At the time, no one understood the significance of the animal’s death, but when hunters were sent out to find a new specimen for the zoo and came up empty, the scientific community realized that the quagga was extinct. The Grant Museum now counts the quagga skeleton as one of its most important possessions, but the rare bones sat recognized for decades when it was incorrectly cataloged as a zebra. In 1972, scientists were closely examining what they believed to be the museum’s pair of “zebras” only to discover that one was a donkey, and the other, a quagga. The quagga was, unfortunately, missing one leg (perhaps unreturned from being loaned out for study), and museum staff made efforts to remedy that problem.3d printed quagga “The files are full of copies of letters from my predecessors saying: ‘Have you by any chance got our quagga leg and if so can we have it back?’” Ashby says. Now the quagga has been restored to its former glory as part of the Grant Museum’s Bone Idols project. That project is tasked with completing the restoration of some 39 of the largest and most important specimens in the museum collection. Nigel Larkin with the quagga bone ready for CT scan Working in conjunction with the Royal Veterinary College and the Bartlett Manufacturing and Design Exchange at University College London, the team rebuilt the skeleton and that process included scanning the remaining hind leg with a CT machine. The bones of the missing leg were then printed in nylon (in black, to clearly mark which are not originals) and articulated by Nigel Larkin to complete the quagga and restore the skeleton to its former glory. Have you ever heard of other instances where extinct animals were repaired or reimagined with 3D printing technology? Let us know in the 3D Printed Quagga forum thread on 3DPB.com. Source: 3dprint.com/84844/3d-print-quagga-skeleton/
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Post by surroundx on Aug 2, 2015 4:40:22 GMT
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2015 8:15:41 GMT
The title of this article and the article itself are quite misleading, it's not about the recreation of an extinct species, but about the re-building of a bone. ... and what is >rare extinct<?  |
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Post by surroundx on Aug 5, 2015 8:31:14 GMT
... and what is >rare extinct<? I assume it means that it is rare because there are few museum specimens (left). |
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Post by koeiyabe on Nov 27, 2015 21:48:57 GMT
 Rice, Paul, and Mayle, Peter (1981). As Dead as a Dodo |
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Post by koeiyabe on Nov 28, 2015 18:37:30 GMT
 "Living Things Vanished from the Earth (in Japanese)" by Toshio Inomata (1993) |
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Post by koeiyabe on Dec 12, 2015 18:38:15 GMT
"The Earth Extinct Fauna (in Japanese)" by Tadaaki Imaizumi (1986)  |
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