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Earlier, the quagga, a relative of the zebra, was thought to be extinct. It has been brought back in the Quagga Project by a team of scientists outside Cape Town, reports CNN.

While most people thought that it had disappeared a century ago, they just saw it again recently.

Quaggas are striped in only the front half of their bodies. The rear half is just a solid brown coat. Even though they roamed around South Africa is large herds, they were decimated and made extinct by the European settlers here by the 1880s, reports News 96.5.

The Quagga Project relied on DNA and selective breeding. Hence, it has selected and bred a number of animals that look alike, but it has resurrected the little-known species for the first time. Concluding that they were sub-species of the plain zebra, and concluding that the quagga genes was still present to some extent in the zebra, the scientists began to breed them.

The colors in the zebra became darker and more prominent with time before the quagga was reborn.

"The progress of the project has in fact followed that prediction. And in fact, we have over the course of four, five generations seen a progressive reduction in striping, and lately, an increase in the brown background color showing that our original idea was, in fact, correct," said Eric Harley the project's leader.

Critics slam the project as a "stunt" even as others accuse the team of creating a different kind of zebra with scarce regard for the behavioral and ecological adaptations of the original quagga. Hence, the real quagga is almost unknown, according to Science Mic.

"There are a lot of detractors who are saying you can't possibly put back the same as what was here," said fellow project leader Mike Gregor. "What we're saying is you can try and do something or you could just not. And I think us trying to do, trying to remedy something, is better than doing nothing at all."

"If we can retrieve the animals or retrieve at least the appearance of the quagga, then we can say we've righted a wrong," Harley added.