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Your morning adorable: Parma wallaby joey drinks from a bottle at Cincinnati Zoo

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Perhaps the cutest resident of the Cincinnati Zoo (well ... top 5, at the very least) is this fellow, an 8-month-old parma wallaby who’s currently living in the zoo’s nursery.

Parma wallabies are small macropods who, as adults, weigh only about 7 to 12 pounds. The species has an interesting history: By the late 1800s, they were believed extinct, and there were no reports of parma wallaby sightings until 1965.

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That year, a group trying to reduce the population of another species, the tammar wallaby, on an island in New Zealand discovered a previously unknown group of parma wallabies living among the more populous species. An effort was quickly launched to catch the parma wallabies and begin a breeding program, with the hope of later reintroducing the species to the wild. Within a few years, another parma wallaby population was found in New South Wales, Australia -- apparently the little guys had just been adept at staying out of the public eye all those years!

Today, the parma wallaby still doesn’t have a large population, but it’s considered ‘near threatened’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature -- not endangered.

See another photo and video of the Cincinnati Zoo’s parma wallaby -- the first of its species ever born there -- after the jump!

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-- Lindsay Barnett

Video: Cincinnati Zoo via YouTube

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