Zebras #2

!cid_X_MA1_1266950164@aol, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Richard Reynolds Now this is a herd of zebras. RBBB, 1928. There should be 25 of them. The three at the bottom are Grevys - - very distinctive with their narrow pin stripes. They are the largest and handsomest of the zebras. They can be mean as heck - - sometimes truly savage. And, they are very endangered, occurring as they do in a limited hardscrabble area of northern Kenya and Ethiopia. It is named after Jules Grevy, president of France who was given one by the Menelik of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1882. It was pronounced a new species, though the ancients of the Mediterranean world were familiar with it. Just to put that into perspective, when Barnum was dickering for the acquisition of Jumbo from the London Zoo, the Grevy zebra was unknown to science. It is rather amazing that an animal so large and striking was so late in being "discovered." RBBB usually had a couple of Grevy zebras from the mid-1920s up until the 1942 Cleveland menagerie fire and some even after WWII.