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Credit: San Diego Zoo<\/p>\nThis adorable new spikey addition rivals the cuteness of even Moo Deng and Punch the monkey<\/p>\n
The world-famous San Diego Zoo has a new adorable, bright orange prehensile-tailed porcupine baby, also known as a porcupette.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The healthy young female porcupette was born on June 22 at 10:20 a.m. to her porcupine parents, Gracie and Picante. Despite being born over a month ago, this beautiful baby has not been given a name yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Credit: San Diego Zoo<\/p>\n
As opposed to the North American porcupines you might imagine, they are much smaller, although their tails are long and they like climbing trees more. They are an arboreal species, meaning they spend most of their time in the trees, and their prehensile tails help them curl around the branches to anchor them in place and keep them from falling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What is unique about prehensile-tailed porcupettes is that they are born with vibrant reddish-orange fur that sheds as they mature, becoming darker. Soon this porcupette will look more like her parents with this darker fur.<\/p>\n
These prehensile-tailed porcupines, also known as Brazilian porcupines, are typically native to the tropical forests of Central and South America. Their conservation status is of least concern; however, in their natural environment, they face habitat loss from deforestation.<\/p>\n
Baby porcupette will join her mother as a special wildlife ambassador at the San Diego Zoo. Visitors might have a chance to see her out in the open as part of educational presentations at Wildlife Explorers Basecamp and the zoo\u2019s Animals in Action programs.<\/p>\n
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After pygmy hippopotamus Moo Deng rose to fame in September 2024 and Punch the monkey was all over the internet earlier this year, the world has another baby animal to adore and fawn over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This adorable new spikey addition rivals the cuteness of even Moo Deng and Punch the monkey The world-famous…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":965266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,4749,1582,276,22049,157728,3549,11414,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-965265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-america","tag-animal","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-deforestation","tag-porcupine","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-zoo","tag-sandiego","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116999460765851539","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/965266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}