Zebra

With their strange, singular appearance, due to the stripes that furrow their bodies, zebras have become symbolic animals for Africa, intensely publicized, more famous even than giraffes with their unusual figure. They are an essential element of the African landscape, of the great savannahs covered with tall grasses, from which, here and there, the umbrella-shaped acacias that botanists named Acacia tortillis sprout. The history of these races of horses (Equide), whose ancestors appeared tens of millions of years ago, in the Eocene, more precisely 70,000,000 years ago on the North American continent, is not only interesting, but also full of significance .

Zebras are considered the oldest representatives of the genus Equus, which is the origin of animals with varied shapes and aspects, such as donkeys and wild horses. The evolution of this group of herbivorous mammals, which possesses an odd number of toes (hence the name of the order, Perissodactyla, which also includes rhinoceroses and tapirs), is quite well known thanks to the numerous fossil remains that paleontologists they had at their disposal. Based on them, they were able to decipher not only the succession of animals in time, but also the changes in the environment that imposed their transformation.

The distant ancestors of horses and zebras lived both in Eurasia and in America. The Old World ones are known as Hyracotherium, while the American forms belonged to the genus Eohippus.

They were animals of the size of a modern fox, having the forelimbs ending with four toes covered with hooves, and the hind limbs with only three toes. They lived in forested areas and fed on the shoots of bushes. However, during the Miocene period, 29,000,000 years ago, the areas covered by forests decreased, being replaced by open steppes, with a rich vegetation of grasses. Abundant food facilitated the development and diversification of Equidae. The new forms that appeared (Mesohippus, Pliohippus), to escape the attack of prey animals, gradually transformed, became taller, due to the lengthening of the legs which, in the end, remained with only one functional toe, the medium, finished with a horned hoof. Moving at speed, they often migrated long distances in search of pastures.

Through the Bering Strait, then covered by thick ice and thus becoming a connecting bridge between America and Asia, the ancestors of zebras and horses spread to Asia, Europe and Africa, but soon disappeared from the American continent. Today, it is considered that the equids that colonized the tropical savannas gave birth to the zebras, those from the desert areas - the donkeys, and the wild horses settled in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Only one million years ago, in the Pleistocene, Equidae were spread over very vast areas, as shown by the abundance of fossil remains. Around the same time, Equus plicatus, the direct ancestor of Grevy's zebra, had already arrived in southern Africa.

At the end of the last glacial period of the Quaternary era, there were still zebras, donkeys and wild horses in Europe. Unfortunately, today wild equids have become very rare, there are only seven species left, three zebras and one donkey - in Africa, a wild horse in the deserts of Mongolia (in fact, saved, in extremis, by a few specimens raised in zoos) and two wild donkeys, the Kiang from Tibet and the Onagra from Iran and India. However, many zoologists believe that these are actually two subspecies of the Hemion, Equus hemionus, the only wild ass in Asia, which survives in small groups spread in some arid areas between Syria and Mongolia.

Africa, the current territory of zebras.

Three species of zebras live in Africa today, located in the eastern and southern parts of the continent, on the territories of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and also in Namibia and South Africa. On this apparently vast space, zebras live in isolated groups. Their life is made easier by the existence of numerous national parks and reservations, which ensure the great migrations. Herds of thousands of individuals travel hundreds of kilometers at the approach of the rainy season, which lasts from January to March, reaching the Serengeti plains. Then, in June, when the heat dries everything, they leave the area and return to the northwest.The largest and most graceful species is Equus grevy.

The animal is, at the withers, 1.60 m tall and weighs between 400 and 450 kg. Its stripes are finer and closer than in other species. It is located in the north of Kenya, in semi-desert areas, with a total population of no more than 10,000 individuals. They are decreasing due to the intensive trade in skins, although, for many years, this has been prohibited, and the species has been declared endangered.