Your morning adorable: Parma wallaby joey drinks from a bottle at Cincinnati Zoo
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.
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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Your morning adorable: Rescued kangaroo joey kneads his paws while enjoying a bottle
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-- Lindsay Barnett
Photos: Al Behrman / Associated Press
Video: Cincinnati Zoo via YouTube
How cute it is :)
Posted by: Endüstriyel Mutfak | July 16, 2010 at 07:49 AM