I SO love what the planet's done with the place around here 🌏🏞️ that I sometimes forget why we say we live in actual paradise.

it's as much (if not more so, judging by both quantity and uniqueness of the wild mix right in our garden 🤩) a wildlife paradise as it is nature's paradise!

feel like Charles Darwin discovering a new species, when in reality all I did was to newly learn that this 60M yo evolutionary lineage, the treeshrew, is a thing, and that it belongs to its very own mammalian order. it's closer to primates than it is to rodents (including squirrels), and one of the few mammals besides humans known to eat spicy food willingly 🌶️

we started at each other (well, I cooed👩‍🍼) for a good 2 mins, so we've had our moment and we're friends now. or it's long since forgotten about me, while I'm over here crash-coursing into a love-struck Scandentia expert 😆

which means I get to tell you that they're such introverted homebodies that even pairing them for breeding can be a challenge because both sexes are fiercely territorial (but once they get over that, they tend to stay together).

also that we use them in animal studies to learn more about the psychosocial stress response, depression, and potential treatments for human mental health disorders.

one more reason why it's awesome to be alive… treeshrews exist!!!