Director´s view

Finally they’re here! The “venerable frogs from Lake Titicaca” came to Prague Zoo and I saw with my own eyes how truly exceptional they really are. Soon, you too will be able to see them for yourself. Our “venerable turnip”, the Czech name for this wonderful amphibian, will be presented to you at our new Titicaca...

In the belief that World Pangolin Day has already entered public awareness and that the media would provide information about it in copious amounts, I devoted the last Director’s View to the recent birth of a male giraffe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Despite the fact that just four days before, the...

After climbing 565 stairs in the Indian town of Tirukalukundram, we reached the top of the mountain, which features a Hindu temple complex known as the Eagle or Vulture Temple. This has gained fame outside of the state of Tamil Nadu because it was on these cliffs, with a broad view of the surrounding countryside, that the...

My fairy tales featuring gorillas from Prague Zoo were written for my children years ago. Later, they reached many other Czech children in book form. In the end, however, it was in Central Africa that they celebrated their greatest success. Twenty thousand copies of Gorilla Fairy Tales – some of which were written by Tereza...

In the last issue of the journal The Science of Nature, we published a paper summarizing the results of our research on how people evaluate the beauty of the mammals in Prague Zoo. Beauty here is related solely to appearance, with no consideration given to movement or any other activities of a given species or the presence of...

The Mongolian rangers Altanashagai and Biligsaichan are on a week-long trip to the Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area on brand new motorbikes. The bikes are laden with fuel, water and materials for the patrol of this desolate area the size of Switzerland. Here they face an extremely strenuous ride taking them on stony and...

You have to have a gun licence for a firearm, a driving licence to drive a car. If you want to buy a lion in the Czech Republic, you don’t need anything at all. A journalist, Zuzana Zelenková, confirmed this and then wrote an article on how she ordered a lion cub on the basis of an advert. “Just one phone call to Vysočina...

When Slovak rapper Rytmus recently added a picture to his Instagram account showing him with a slow loris while on an exotic holiday, he soon reaped a whirlwind of criticism. He inadvertently became the face of a Facebook campaign calling for a boycott of selfies with “cute animals”.

  When I was nine or ten, I got a paperback book with a white cover. It was written by John Crompton and was called The Life of a Spider. I read it repeatedly at primary school, but I even browsed through it at university, just before my exam under Professor Buchar. Not that I learnt from it, not at all, but thanks to the...