South Africa’s suid cinderella

Common warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) photo © Charles J Sharp

Prof. Mumblebard claims: “Several types of large mammals have become extinct in southern Africa. In the case of the quagga, it’s possible to simulate the appearance of the animal by selective breeding from the nearest subspecies of plains zebra. However successful this simulation, it would restore to the South African fauna only an additional subspecies. Obviously, no full species of mammal, once extinct in South Africa, can ever appear here again.”

Figure 1. Common warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) [photo by Charles J Sharp]

Figure 2. Desert warthog (Phacochoerus aethiopicus) [photo from Wikimedia Commons]

Robin and the Honey Badger respond: “The desert warthog (Figure 2) which survives in eastern Kenya is a different species from the common warthog (Figure 1). What has been overlooked is that the desert warthog belongs to the same species as the Cape warthog, which shared the range of the extinct quagga and suffered extermination around the same time. Because the Cape warthog is merely an extinct subspecies of a species surviving elsewhere, the potential remains to return an ostensibly extinct species from Kenya to South Africa, where it rightfully belongs in all the conservation areas in the Karoo.”

Please join us here at the Bio-edge with your own comments. In the discussion below we encourage links to any evidence supporting either Prof. Mumblebard or Robin and the Honey Badger. Illustrations are welcome but please cite all sources or we may be forced under copyright to delete your comment.