IT’S OFTEN REMARKED that baby giraffes are among the world’s clumsiest animals, flailing uncontrollably as they try to get to grips with their disproportionately long and gangly limbs.

Well, in case you weren’t entirely convinced of how inelegant they can be, here’s your proof. This is an extract from ‘The Zoo’, RTÉ’s TV series on life at Dublin Zoo, which returns to screens tonight.

This clumsy creature features heavily in tonight’s episode, which includes recorded-as-live footage of its birth as well as its first efforts to get on its feet.

Also featuring tonight is a pygmy marmoset, which you probably won’t have seen before: it’s the world’s smallest monkey, boasting an adult body no taller than six inches.

So take the world’s smallest monkey, and then have it give birth to triplets – something monkeys almost never do.

The result is that the smallest child in the litter is almost invariably abandoned, because its mother (having only two nipples, remember) decides it’d be too much work to try and nurture a weak, third child.

Here, one of the baby marmosets is left to be fed by zoo staff, who need to be particularly delicate – not only because the marmoset’s mouth is so small, but because the creature is so tiny that simply clenching a fist could kill it.

The Zoo airs this evening at 7pm on RTÉ One.

Both videos here courtesy of zootvseries on YouTube.

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