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Saturday, March 14, 2009

The Most Famous Thumb in the World


In 1993, after the second uprising in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the Skansen Aquarium in Stockholm supported the orphaned bonobos I was caring for in Kinshasa. Skansen is a small facility located on the grounds of the Skansen Institution, an open air museum that was founded in 1891.

The Skansen aquarium is known for its fresh and salt-water life, reptiles, rain forest exhibit, small mammals, and primates. They have bred hundreds of pygmy marmosets, and the offspring are scattered in zoos around the world. The pygmy marmoset put Skansen on the map, and a baby marmoset on the director's thumb made it on the cover of Reader's Digest. The director's thumb and "passenger" became Skansen Aquarium's logo.

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