KARL SHUKER peers through his stereoscopic glasses to find a new quagga photo (or two)
ALIEN ZOO
A QUAGGA ON EBAY!
Until very recently, only five photographs were known to exist depicting a living specimen of South Africa’s famously partially-striped plains zebra subspecies known as the quagga, which became extinct in 1883 due to over-hunting. In late April 2024, however, news that some additional photos of a live quagga had been rediscovered was published by Branden Holmes on his Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database website. Moreover, unlike all of the previous five photos, these were not of the same quagga mare at London Zoo from 1851 to 1872. Instead, they were of a specimen living at the South African farm of Andrew Hudson Bain, ‘Quaggafontein’, which had been snapped on 8 April 1864 there by German physician Dr Gustav T Fritsch (1838-1927). Quagga researchers already knew that Fritsch had created a stereoscopic (three-dimensional) magic lantern slide for projection purposes, and although this 3-D slide’s fate is now unknown, Fritsch had used it to prepare a mirror-image photoxylograph that does still exist. However, in December 2022 painter Jasper Hulshoff Pol noticed a listing for a slide of a quagga in an 1878 catalogue produced by a Max Fritsch, and he subsequently succeeded in purchasing a copy of this slide on eBay! The slide consisted of two near-identical photos mounted side by side, rather than an actual 3-D photo. But if these two images were viewed together using a stereoscopic viewer, they would yield Fritsch’s original 3-D quagga photo. In short, therefore, they actually constitute three separate quagga photos – the two near-identical ones, plus the 3-D version that results from viewing them together stereoscopically.
There is, however, a degree of controversy regarding these rediscovered photos – is the specimen that they depict truly a bona fide quagga? In the past, Fritsch’s photoxylograph has been dismissed as depicting a bontequagga (aka Burchell’s zebra, a closely-related subspecies to the quagga); but in a 2021 scientific paper, quagga chroniclers Peter Heywood and Keith H Dietrich proposed that due to its limbs’ readily-visible lack of striping and its unstriped rump, the South African farm-held animal in question was a genuine quagga. And these lately revealed photos of it do seem to bear out their proposal. Isn’t it amazing the discoveries that can be made on eBay?!
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