The Answer to the Critter Quiz

On Tuesday, I posted a "can you identify this animal" quiz. I put a picture of an animal up, along with some information about it. The photograph was taken with the animal in captivity, at a location that was relatively near where the animal lived in the wild. The picture was not taken in Australia, and the DNA sequence that was superimposed over the image came from the animal in the picture.

Shawna was the first person to correctly identify both the species of the animal and the location where the picture was taken. The animal is a Brush-Tailed Rock Wallaby (Petrogale penicillata), and the picture was taken at the Honolulu Zoo. The species identification was confirmed by sparc, based on a BLAST search of the DNA sequence in the picture. (If you want a how-to on that, Sandy has an excellent one up on one of her sites.)

The wallaby in the picture was captured in June of 2005 on the grounds of Tripler Army Medical Center. It was transported first to the humane society then the zoo. It was held there for a few months, until the legendary Professor Steve Steve could find the time in his busy schedule to come out to Hawaii and show us how to properly handle the task of re-releasing it into the wild.