Back into the wild.
As the sun began to sink over the grasslands of central Mongolia, a herd of stocky, dun-colored horses emerged from a rocky outcrop on a slope where they had been sheltering from the blazing heat of a mid-summer’s day. “Early in the morning and late in the evening they come down to this stream to drink water,” explained Gegee Azjargal, a botanist at Mongolia’s Hustai National Park, observing the horses through a telescope as they picked their way down the hill. She spoke in a reverential tone, for these beasts are something special: they are the only wild horses left in the world. These horses are members of an endangered species native to the Eurasian steppe that went extinct in the wild in the 1960s but is now recovering – slowly – in Mongolia thanks to conservation efforts. “In Mongolia, we have known this animal for centuries. We call them takhis,” explained Dashpurev Tserendeleg, director of the Hustai National Park, which is home to the largest population of these wild horses on the planet. The rest of the world knows this species as Przewalski’s horse, named after Russian explorer Nikolay Przewalski, who revealed their existence to the outside world in the late 19th century. Analysis of a skull and hide he sent to Russia in 1878, plus some later specimens, confirmed this to be a previously unknown species of wild horse, which acquired the name Equus przewalskii. This was “huge news” to a world that believed wild horses no longer existed, said Tserendeleg. (Descended from domesticated horses, America’s Mustangs are not considered truly wild.)
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