You’ve gotta hear about Bradley Baylor, the back-flipping lemur.
What’s a lemur, you might ask.

PHOTO: Ring-tailed lemur at Primarily Primates Sanctuary, San Antonio, Texas. By Jane Seymour.
Well, a lemur is a prosimian: neither monkey nor ape but a primate who descended from their common ancestors. In other words, lemurs — whose societies are widely described, notably, as matriarchal — hark back to the common origin of all today’s primates including ourselves.
It’s one of the world’s modern wonders that lemurs still grace the planet. They avoided being displaced by monkeys and apes on a unique little pocket of biodiversity off Africa’s eastern coast: the island of Madagascar.
But today, the lemurs who live there are in serious trouble. People hunt them, and they hardly have a home to hide in. Deforestation for timber and agribusiness has wiped out more than 90% of Madagascar’s woodlands.
You might be surprised, given what they’ve already got to cope with, but lemurs are also sought after by pet traders. In fact, they can be purchased over the Internet where the going rate is $1200.
Ring-tailed lemurs are advertised as the hot fashion in pets, thanks to celebrities such as Hollywood’s Kirstie Alley, who has lemurs in a back-yard cage and plans to show them off to a television audience this weekend.
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