Zoo

A zoo (short for zoological park, zoological garden, or animal park, and also called a menagerie) is a facility in which animals are confined within enclosures, displayed to the public, and in which they may also be bred.

The term zoological garden refers to zoology, the study of animals, a term deriving from the Greek zōon (ζῷον, "animal") and lógos (λóγος, "study"). The abbreviation "zoo" was first used of the London Zoological Gardens, which opened for scientific study in 1828 and to the public in 1857. The number of major animal collections open to the public around the world now exceeds 1,000, around 80 percent of them in cities.

Etymology

London Zoo, which opened in 1826, first called itself a menagerie or "zoological forest," which is short for "Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society of London." The abbreviation "zoo" first appeared in print in the UK around 1847, when it was used for the Clifton Zoo, but it was not until some 20 years later that the shortened form became popular in the song "Walking in the Zoo on Sunday" by music-hall artist Alfred Vance. The term "zoological park" was used for more expansive facilities in Washington, D.C., and the Bronx in New York, which opened in 1891 and 1899 respectively.

Zoo (file format)

zoo is a data compression program and format developed by Rahul Dhesi in the mid-1980s. The format is based on the LZW compression algorithm and compressed files are identified by the .zoo file extension. It is no longer widely used. Program source code was originally published on the comp.sources.misc Usenet newsgroup, and was compatible with a variety of Unix-like operating systems. Binaries were also published for the MS-DOS and AmigaOS user communities. A small companion program was also developed, entitled booz, that provides only decompression functionality.

The .ZOO file format was mostly popular with Digital (now Hewlett Packard) VAX computers running the OpenVMS operating system, and for a time with the Commodore Amiga community.

Zoo features

Zoo archives can store multiple "generations" of a file; if files are added to an archive with the same pathname yet more recent date, if generations are enabled for the archive the older version(s) will be retained (with a semicolon and version number, similar to version numbers in the VMS and RT-11 operating systems) as the new file is added. This allows files that are frequently modified to be backed up in such a way as to allow access to previous versions (up to the version limit chosen) from one archive.

Fort Worth Zoo

The Fort Worth Zoo is a zoo in Fort Worth, Texas, United States, that was founded in 1909 with one lion, two bear cubs, an alligator, a coyote, a peacock and a few rabbits. The zoo now is home to 5,000 native and exotic animals and has been named as a top zoo in the nation by Family Life magazine, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, as well as one of the top zoos in the South by Southern Living Reader's Choice Awards.

The Fort Worth Zoo is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA).

History

When the Fort Worth Zoo opened in 1909, it had one African lion, two bear cubs, an alligator, a coyote, a peacock and a few rabbits. From its opening until 1991, the zoo was owned and operated by the City of Fort Worth. Although the city collected money from the community to purchase new animals, the Zoological society (now the Fort Worth Zoological Association) was formed in 1939 to help raise additional funds.

Monkey Island was built in 1937 with funds from the Works Progress Administration. In 1949, this exhibit became a sea lion pool, and by 1970, it had been converted to house small South American mammals. Storks and cranes were housed in this exhibit in the 1980s, and it was converted once again in the early 1990s to house alligators. It is currently being used as the Parrot Paradise exhibit.