Checking, as many new nocturnal houses opened as old ones closed in the last two decades.
Actually, innovations in the zoo world usually come from smaller, new zoos and outside the industry. It is only natural that most innovative zoos in Central Europe and Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and some of the former DDR (mostly Leipzig and Magdeburg). In Britain you have Hamerton, RSSC and a generation ago Gerald Durrell, John Aspinall and Marwell. I will not name all these old city zoos in Europe which look like museums of old buildings with poorly fitted just-adequate exhibits. In this way, the most innovative zoos in a short future will be in Asia, and Europe will soon start to copy Asian innovations and import Asian species. Things like huge aviaries from Jurong or oceanaria from Japan.
However, few Czech zoos got, by chance, some zoo management people who are into old-time post-stamp zoo collection mentality of ages long past (with some of its negative connotations). One botanist who worked in unimportant arboretum park in impoverished coal-mining region who got a new job by Pilsen Zoo-and-Botanical-Garden, took his private collection of small birds and mammals with him to the new workplace and agreed, to work as both botanist and animal curator to save on salaries in seriously struggling small zoo. One ornitologist and birdwatcher who got only animal-related job by luck as mammal curator at Prague zoo. Take some more people like this, put them into wild 90s in Eastern Europe where zoos were barely surviving and often hastily appointed zoo directors let a lot of creative freedom to their underlings. Shake it. And you get some serious zoo biodiversity.
Actually, innovations in the zoo world usually come from smaller, new zoos and outside the industry. It is only natural that most innovative zoos in Central Europe and Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and some of the former DDR (mostly Leipzig and Magdeburg). In Britain you have Hamerton, RSSC and a generation ago Gerald Durrell, John Aspinall and Marwell. I will not name all these old city zoos in Europe which look like museums of old buildings with poorly fitted just-adequate exhibits. In this way, the most innovative zoos in a short future will be in Asia, and Europe will soon start to copy Asian innovations and import Asian species. Things like huge aviaries from Jurong or oceanaria from Japan.