Mouse Deer

So yesterday my friend Jenn and I got the brilliant idea to go to Central Park and see "The Gates." (Punctuation help...where does the period go in that previous sentence?) This idea was brilliant because it was raining, and by brilliant I mean brilliant sarcastically. So instead of traipsing along the park under neon orange things (which I liked, incidentally, but not enough to argue about), we went to the Central Park Zoo, which I have never been to before.

And which is awesome! It's not particularly huge or anything, but they have some pretty dang colorful and interesting animals there. In the interesting category was an ant farm, which I've never seen before, having never been a child. Seeing those teeming, throbbing ants squeeze by each other through narrow, grossly slick tunnels made me realize I could have never had an ant farm.

Anyway, my favorite animal was the Malaysian Mouse Deer. The Malaysian Mouse Deer succeeded in freaking me the heck out. I don't think that creepy picture I picked does it justice. Neither a mouse nor a deer, the Malaysian Mouse Deer looks exactly like a horrible genetic experiment combining a mouse and a deer. And yet it seems like said horrible geneticists needed some extra DNA to bridge the gap and used spider or insectoid matter to do so...it glided along its spindly legs with very creeping, spastic non-mammalian motions.

The best part of watching this freak was that it was in the same pen as a turtle. A crazy mouse deer and a turtle. I'm sure the turtle had some cool name or features but it looked like a regular turtle to me. As they simultaneously fed from the same dish of veggies, the turtle had to be thinking how crazy it was that it got teamed up with this thing. Or it was thinking about how it had to go duck in the water to regulate its own temperature...or it was thinking nothing. Probably that last one.

And if you're wondering what the Mouse Deer thought of "The Gates," check here.