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Studies on this extinct zebra have twice had major impacts on science. What does its future hold? ABSTRACT. Quaggas, partially striped zebras from South Africa, have had major impacts on science. In the nineteenth century, the results of mating between a quagga stallion and a horse mare influenced thinking about mechanisms of inheritance for more than seventy years. In the twentieth century, tissue from a quagga yielded the first DNA of an extinct organism to be cloned and sequenced. Selective breeding of plains zebras in South Africa has produced animals whose coat coloration resembles that of some quaggas. This raises the intriguing possibility that quaggas may once again be the focus of scientific investigations. Quaggas had a striking appearance: the face, neck and the anterior part of their bodies had white stripes like zebras, however, unlike other zebras their legs were not striped. The remainder of the quagga and the background color in the areas with white stripes was a brownish color – sometimes described as light brown, reddish-brown or yellowish-brown In 1758 Linnaeus created the genus Equus to include horses, donkeys, and zebras, and gave the binomial name E. zebra to the Cape mountain zebra. This was one of three zebras occurring in South Africa, the others being the plains zebra or Burchell’s zebra, E. burchelli and the quagga, E. quagga. The species name, quagga, was the common name for this zebra and is onomatopoeic: it was the sound of the zebra’s barking cry of kwa-ha (the letters “g ” are pronounced as “h”). Quaggas ranged through the grasslands and arid interior scrubland (also known as “Karoo”) of the contemporar