7 Most Beautiful Extinct Animals to Ever Live

Extinct Animal
Photo by miha de at Shutterstock

Quagga

This extinct animal looked like a horse and a zebra that were combined. It diverged from modern zebras about 200,000 years ago. The quagga’s name stands for the audible sound the animal made. They lived in South Africa near the Karoo Region in Cape Province.

This area is a dry grassland with shrubbery. In 1883, the last known quagga died in captivity at the Artis Magistra Zoo in Amsterdam. Quagga meat and hides were valuable, and they competed with livestock for food. There are only a few photographs of one living quagga from the London Zoo and almost two dozen surviving taxidermied quaggas.

In 1987, the Quagga Project was launched to focus on breeding existent zebras. So they are much like a quagga. So far, the Quagga Project has resulted in animals that look almost like extinct quaggas.

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