Being a paleontologist means spending 4 days diving down a taxonomic citation rabbit hole only to realize, at the end, that nobody has officially established what a zebra is/is not, despite like ten papers very nearly doing so
Kaedan O'Brien, Ph.D.
There are three modern zebra species. If you ask me, the last common ancestor of all three (the first true zebra) is a currently unnamed species from Kenya that lived 1.9-0.7 Ma as it gradually split into the three daughters. The oldest "modern" zebras are ~500,00 yrs old (O'Brien et al. 2021)
