Lesley Smitheringale Fine Art

Meet Indah, the Baby Binturong

Sydney, Australia

May 30, 2007—No, a kitten and a bear cub didn’t get jumbled together using the machine from the 1986 horror flick The Fly. Indah, seen here, is actually an eight-week-old binturong on display at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. The fledgling—the first binturong bred in captivity at Taronga since the species went on display there in the 1950s—was introduced to her new enclosure on Wednesday, May 30.

Though they are often called bearcats because of their appearance, binturongs are actually tree-dwelling, nocturnal mammals more closely related to civets. Native to Southeast Asia, Malaysia, and Indonesia, binturongs are becoming increasingly rare as their forest habitat is cleared for timber and cropland.

Full article can be read here: http://news.worldwild.org/baby-binturong-the-bearcat/

Technorati tags: binturong, animals, endangered animals, taronga zoo, sydney, baby animals, bearcats