New Life For A Vanished Zebra? - efforts to breed the 'extinct' quagga zebra in South Africa

Yet the black-and-white photographs hide a frustration in the breeding program. "It hasn't happened yet that we get the lovely brown color of one individual and the much reduced striping of another together in one foal," Rau admits. "We've got to have a lot of patience." Stallions take up to five years to reach breeding age. The first foal of the second generation was born only last year.

Heidenreich, a retired professor of animal husbandry, estimates that it will take 30 more years to reach the top row on that poster. "Some of us won't be living that long," he laments. Most troubling to committee members is that Rau, age 67, might be one of them. "A man that committed is not easy to find," worries Willie Smith, an animal nutritionist who recalls many 5 am telephone calls from Rau, fretting about an ailing zebra.

Rau does not insist on a top-row quagga, however. "If we get a foal one day that fits in the middle of this poster, then I would be happy to call that a quagga. That genuine quagga could be born any moment, but it might also take 20 or 30 years. It might also never happen; we don't know."

Many scientists are not as concerned about the wait as they are about Rau's name for the resulting animal. "Quaggas are extinct," asserts Ryder of the San Diego Zoo. "There's a difference between producing animals that have the appearance of the quagga and actually resurrecting quaggas." Ryder and others believe that the quagga may have evolved other genetic adaptations to the dry Karoo that will never be reassembled through selective breeding. "It's much like taking the New York phone book, cutting it all into pieces, casting it into the wind and saying, 'now we're going to put it back together.'"

"We blow that argument to the wind," counters Rau, referring to the alleged adaptations. He notes that the grasses of the Karoo are virtually the same as those to the immediate northeast, only sparser, and that recently introduced plains zebras thrive on game farms in the region. He also emphasizes that the quagga was named and described scientifically on the basis of appearance alone. "The quagga is a quagga because of the way that it looked, and if you produce animals that look that way then they are quaggas. Finished," he declares.

While many South African conservationists line up on Rau's side, some fear that an ill-considered name for this animal might weaken the fight to save others. "If you say it is a quagga, people might allow extinctions, saying, 'we can recreate that later,'" warns Peter Lloyd, chief conservation scientist for the Western Cape province. Project committee members attempt to address the concern by stressing that they are "retrieving" rather than "re-creating" the quagga, and by emphasizing that selective breeding is useless in the case of an extinct species.

By whatever name it is called, Rau has a clear picture of where he would like to see his living legacy. On his office wall, to the left of the poster, is a framed photograph of the Karoo landscape that Rau has doctored by pasting on quaggas. The collage is nearing reality. Last year, the first animals from the project were moved from the mountainous Cape coast to the Karoo National Park. Their arrival may have been premature, but the national park's leaders harbor no illusion that they can show visitors a virgin tableau. The extinct Cape lion subspecies is missing. And grazing populations are kept artificially low to help revive grasses once decimated by livestock. Created in 1979 from sheep pastures, the park is part of a broad yet belated effort to compensate for 300 years of devastation in a biome larger than California.