Director´s view

We have already three “Przhevalsky’s” in the new Gobi Exhibit – three animal species, which were named after Russian geographer Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky (1839–1888). Besides Przewalski’s horse it is Gobi racerunner (Eremias przewalskii) and Przewalski's toadhead agama (Phrynocephalus przewalskii).

Last Friday I published in a newspaper a photo of the gorilla female Mobi “looking out” for a sibling. By that I meant the baby, which Kijivu was due to give birth any day, if not any second.

Olgoi-khorkhoi – the mythical killing worm from the Gobi Desert – is perhaps better known today in Czech Republic than in Mongolia itself. It happened thanks to Czech enigmologists, who searched for it in local sand dunes. And on top of that, one of them, the late Ivan Mackerle, gave rise to olgoi-khorkhoi‘s world-wide...

The mystical olgoi-khorkhoi was once a great mystery. This is no longer the case; we know the truth about it. Now you can even come and see the animal, which used to be its archetype.

It was constantly below zero in Astana last week. However, it didn’t matter too much because we spent almost all our four-day-long stay there in meetings and negotiations.

I met the Zoos Victoria Director Dr Jenny Gray after almost two years. In the administration building of Melbourne Zoo we talked about what had happened during that time. “And most importantly, after ten years of fruitless searching we found Victorian dragon. It went unobserved for fifty-four years and many considered it...

Today, on Saturday, February 10, we published the name of the gorilla female, born in Prague Zoo at the very beginning of this year. Sure, I will write it at the end of this text, but first about selecting the name. In fact, this time we proceeded in a completely unconventional way. We asked the children from Cameroonian town...

I started calling her Pýchavka (Puffball). Pýchavka with y, although for a spiny animal, Píchavka would be more suggestive. (Píchavka is derived from the verb píchat, which means to prickle in English). But in the first video taken by the camera her spines were hardly noticeable, and she really reminded me more of a...

Two big news items of the past year appear for the first time only in this summary: as the only one breeding facility outside of Brazil we obtained the rarest duck of the world – Brazilian merganser – and we succeeded to breed short-beaked echidna. However, the year 2023 was above all the year of the first pangolin bred in...