Your morning adorable: Lesser mouse-deer

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We showed you one resident of the Singapore Zoo‘s Fragile Forest exhibit, the Matschie’s tree kangaroo, yesterday. Another animal in the Fragile Forest, which spotlights species in danger of extinction, is the lesser mouse-deer (also known as a kanchil).

The lesser mouse-deer is native to parts of southeast Asia and is the world’s smallest known hoofed mammal (adults weigh about four-and-a-half pounds). The species could rightly be considered a ‘living fossil,’ because it’s the only surviving species from a group of hoofed animals that lived 35 million years ago.

--Lindsay Barnett