In the 1570s, King Philip II of Spain sent emissaries to survey the flora and fauna of villages in central and southern Spain. Now, 450 years later, a team of ecologists says the resulting answers to that survey have value as ecological surveys.
, they found various animals that lived and roamed across central Spain are now restricted to the north of Spain, whereas some plants that are abundant in the country now weren’t around in the 16th century.
The locals, who may not have been literate, likely told their responses to the surveyors, who wrote them down in old Castilian. Then, early 20th century historians translated these responses into modern Spanish. Viana and his team mostly used these transcriptions to make sense of the old documents. Some animals never made it to modern day. Only two villages, for instance, reported seeing the zebro, an ancient wild “donkey horse” that had stripes similar to today’s zebras but gray hair reminiscent of donkeys and horses.
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