Chester Zoo in north-west England welcomed a newborn tree hare – a rare arboreal species – with a standing ovation kangaroo – when he was first seen emerging from his mother’s pouch.
Smaller in size than the Australian kangaroo, Goodfellow’s tree hare is a marsupial found in rainforests of Papua New Guinea. Due to deforestation and poaching, their population has halved in 30 years.
His scientific team zoo was monitoring the newborn’s development thanks to a special endoscope that he placed in his mother’s bag a few weeks after he came into the world last July.
As Dave White points out, the birth of marsupials is one of the most complicated processes in the entire animal kingdom: the newborn is not fully developed and instinctively follows a path in the mother’s belly until it enters the pouch. When he gets there, he will attach himself to a teat to feed and after about six months – when he is big enough – he will open his eyes and stick his head out of the pouch to explore the environment around him.
In the following days, the little tree snake, as reported by the Athens News Agency, he is expected to leave his mother’s pouch now and start learning the first jumps and climbing trees.
Source: News Beast
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