London Zoo 2001 - The historic Mappin Terraces

London Zoo 2001 - The historic Mappin Terraces
03-01-2011

Scanned photo from my visit in September 2001.

The historic Mappin Terraces held at the time a pair of Sri Lankan Sloth Bears mixed with Gray or Hanuman Langurs.

03-01-2011

The Langurs were Hanumans (Semnopithecus entellus), unfortunetly all gone from the zoo now. I think the exhibit might have housed Gibbons and Muntjac when it opened aswell come to think of it.
I have to say I much prefered the enclosure like this than it's current state as an Australian Outback.

03-01-2011

Muntjac, yes; gibbons, no.

This never really worked as a bear enclosure. the animals were seldom visible in any great way - and there was a horrible hodge-podge of wires and barriers across which one observed them. That said, the current incarnation - wallabies and emus - is just ghastly beyond belief.

03-01-2011

Pedantically, the langurs were Tufted/Sri Lankan Grey Langurs, Semnopithecus priam thersites, rather than S. entellus, though I'm not sure if they were labelled as such. The Semnopithecus population in Europe had multiple lineages that seem to have only been relatively recently been sorted out.

The only European zoo currently keeping S. p. thersites is Antwerp; all the other European Semnopithecus are S. entellus except for Terai Grey Langurs (Semnopithecus hector) at Ostrava (Zootierliste adds Vyskov, which I believe used to hold a surplus male from Ostrava but there was no sign of this in May).


And I would agree that while the bear/monkey combo never worked as well as it could have, it was far more interesting than the emu/wallaby one, which I'm still hoping is a stop-gap.