A baby slender loris, native to Sri Lanka. It has excellent night vision. (Photo courtesy of Zoological Society of London)
Scientists at the London Zoo have launched an effort to save some of the oddest animals on Earth. Rebecca
Williams reports most of them aren’t well-protected:
Transcript
Scientists at the London Zoo have launched an effort to save some of the oddest animals on Earth. Rebecca
Williams reports most of them aren’t well-protected:
We all know about rhinos and pandas, But there’s also the hairy-nosed wombat, the golden-rumped
elephant shrew and the pygmy hippo. Most of them have faces as strange as their names.
Jonathan Baillie is the project’s lead researcher. He says the animals that made the list are both one of a
kind and on the verge of going extinct.
“The solenodon is a creature that’s like a giant shrew that injects venom into its prey, the long-eared
jerboa’s like a miniature kangaroo that lives in the Gobi Desert, and it has enormous ears. The reason
they’re so different is they represent entire lineages so they have few close relatives and that’s why it’s so
important we conserve them because if they’re gone there’s just nothing like them.”
Baillie says many of the animals are small, and have flown under the radar of other conservation efforts.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.