It's been a while since I visited, but Twycross used to have a family tree for their black and white colobus, but without any identification photos - I don't think many of us would be able to tell them apart however good the photos were.
Alan
They do still have this up, and, as Pertinax suggests, it really seemed to confirm how
many Colobus had been bred there ....... it certainly didn't help with individual identification, nor explain which monkeys remain at the zoo.
I've been racking my brains about Colchester, and despite multiple visits there, I really can't think of
any family tree style info there ....... no, wait a minute, I think there
is one in the indoor chimp area (in a corner by the door where it isn't obvious), yet last time I noticed this, it wasn't up to date as the new baby chimp Talia wasn't included ..... and, it was a bit misleading, because I'm not sure all the Colchester chimps are related, so what they really need is a tree showing what family relationships DO exist there, plus a 'Who's who' series of pictures and info so the visitor can identify individuals and find out a bit more about their backgrounds (and not just those related to each other). Though there is always a notice up about one of the older females (whose name escapes me - perhaps Billie-Jo ?) who displays rocking when she's stressed (due to a laboratory background if I recall correctly).
Unless I've missed it there is nothing similar about the elephants (admittedly, this would be in their indoor barn, and, as they are usually out, I rarely go in there), neither is there anything about the aardvarks, the wolves, the L'hoest monkeys, Colobus, the black spider monkeys, the patas monkeys, the Mandrills or the Gelada baboons. I appreciate this kind of info would be hard to compile for larger groups of smaller animals such as the meerkats or the squirrel monkeys - and may not serve much useful purpose for the visitor (who could spend all day trying to individually identify a particular and fast moving squirrel monkey) but in the medium size groups it would definitely add extra interest. Even where there is just one or two examples of an animal, I'd still be interested in a basic bio: age, sex, place of birth, any other zoos it's lived in, individual traits and so on.
If you go on the 'road train' past the back of the wolf area, the driver tells you how to identify the dominant female - she's the only one with white legs, so why similar info can't be posted up by the observation windows while you're looking at them I don't know.
