Elephant Shrews Charm Visitors With Funny Expressions

This photograph of a sengi yawning has gone viral in social media websites across the world. (Photo: Chester Zoo) While most mammals are not monogamous and have several different mates during their lifetime, the elephant-shrew is different – when they find a mate, they say together until they die. Chester Zoo's assistant team manager, James Andrewes, said: They might look like a shrew but, fascinatingly, our new arrivals are in fact distantly related to manatees, aardvarks, hyraxes and elephants. In the past the species was commonly known as the elephant-shrew, but many biologists are now referring to them as sengi so as not to confuse them with true shrews. They're a really charismatic and intriguing little species and, having now had our first successes with encouraging them to breed, we're beginning to learn more and more about them. In fact, there are nineteen different species of sengi, which are very poorly known in the wild and only as recently as last year a new species was discovered in Namibia.