opossum
zooillogix | November 3, 2008One of Zooillogix's readers, Tweet Gainsborough-Waring (awesome name btw), recently sent me these photos of ring tailed possums (the red ones) and brush possums (the grey ones), which she snapped on her way out to pizza in Brisbane, Australia. She pointed out that these furry little guys are fairly common in her neck of the woods, but to me they are exotic, so I'm sharing them.
So what's common in your neighborhood that clueless tourists might find fascinating? Growing up in New England, it was these adorable little guys:
In Japan, so I understand, the following fauna are quite common:…
zooillogix | December 17, 2007Much like Pier 1 Imports is the place to make great unexpected holiday gift discoveries this season, Indonesia is the #1 source for mildly inventive new mammal species. In the Foja Mountains rainforest of eastern Papua province, a joint Indonesian and American research team recently stumbled across some new critters. More correctly, in the case of at least one, it stumbled across them. "The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat," said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the…
zooillogix | May 9, 2007(Not exactly a bizarre zoological curiosity, but maybe it could fall in the exotic pet category? Either way, the world deserves to know.)Robert Bashwell, a 44-year old homeless man in West Palm Beach, Florida, fell asleep in a dumpster to escape the rain, but woke up to find himself in the back of a garbage truck being crushed by the truck's trash compressor. In order to shield the blows of the compacting garbage, Bashwell claims he used the corpse of a dead opossum.
Jaws of life..."I screamed one last breath," Bashwell said, but a trash collector discovered him before it was too late.…