‘Playful Youngster’: See the Rare, Endangered Przewalski’s Horse Born at the Bronx Zoo

The foal was born on April 21 and is now romping around with the rest of the herd in the zoo’s seasonal Wild Asia Monorail exhibit. It belongs to a species whose members are often considered the last truly wild horses

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

June 1, 2026 5:32 p.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Conservationists are celebrating the birth of a rare Przewalski’s horse, often considered the last truly wild species of horse in the world.

The unnamed foal was born on April 21 at the Bronx Zoo, according to a May 26 statement. The “playful youngster” is now on view with the rest of the zoo’s Przewalski’s horses as part of the seasonal Wild Asia Monorail exhibit, according to the zoo, which is operated by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Przewalski’s horses (pronounced shuh-VAL-skee) are often called the only truly wild horses alive today, though recent research has challenged that designation. Genetic testing suggests they split from a common ancestor they shared with domestic horses roughly 500,000 years ago, making the two species distant cousins.

Przewalski’s horses looks similar to domestic horses, but they tend to be stockier and have shorter legs. Their coats are a tannish-white color known as “dun,” while their manes and tails sport a darker brown hue.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bronx Zoo (@bronxzoo)

“Nature intended them to be rough-and-tumble horses,” Gavin Livingston, formerly the curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, told the Chronicle of the Horse’s Patti Schofler in 2023. “They’re not tall. They have big, thick legs, all muscle. They have shorter muscular necks. They are made to run and buck and kick and fight. … You see them kicking, being rough with each other, mane biting and tail pulling. That’s how they speak to each other.”

Przewalski’s horses once roamed throughout Europe and Asia. But human activity, including habitat loss and hunting, pushed the horses to the brink of extinction.

In the late 1960s, the species was declared extinct in the wild, with the last known population living in southern Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. However, a small number of wild-caught horses continued to survive at zoos and private parks, which organized captive breeding programs to save the species.

Over the last few decades, the Przewalski’s horse—also called takhi, which means “spirit” in Mongolia—has been slowly making a comeback. The global captive breeding population now stands at around 2,000 individuals, and the creatures have been reintroduced to China, Mongolia, the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. However, the species is still considered endangered, so every birth is a big deal.

All Przewalski’s horses alive today descend from just 12 individuals, so conservationists remain hard at work to improve the species genetic diversity.

“It’s a major issue—to make sure the population is big enough to avoid too high an instance of inbreeding,” Claudia Feh, a conservation biologist who has spent decades trying to save the Przewalski’s horse, told Smithsonian magazine’s Paige Williams in 2016. “This is going to be a big challenge for the future.”

Since 2018, scientists have been experimenting with DNA from a stallion whose skin cells were frozen at the San Diego Zoo in 1980. In 2020, they announced a clone named Kurt had been made from the stallion’s DNA. He was born via a surrogate domestic horse mother. They repeated the process to produce a second clone, named Ollie, who was born in 2023.

The clones’ DNA carries genetic variations that had been lost from living Przewalski’s horses. Kurt and Ollie now live at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, where researchers are hopeful that they’ll eventually reproduce and add some much-needed genetic diversity to the global herd.

Meanwhile, biologists continue to release more Przewalski’s horses into the wild. On May 25, five individuals were released into the Altyn Dala State Nature Reserve in Kazakhstan, reports Dmitry Pokidaev for the Times of Central Asia. Those animals include a stallion named Galvan from Prague, as well as four mares from Hortobágy National Park in Hungary.

Additionally, four stallions are being transported from the Prague Zoo to Kazakhstan this week. Four mares from Berlin are expected to arrive in the country later this week under the zoo’s “Return of the Wild Horses” initiative.

“In Kazakhstan … we are establishing an entirely new population,” says Barbora Dobiášová, curator of ungulates at the Prague Zoo, in a statement. “Each stallion that breeds in the steppe will found its own lineage.”

Sarah Kuta | Read More

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.