Aye-aye

Nocturnal lemurs found only on Madagascar, the aye-aye die out in Africa when monkeys, whose use of twigs better enables them to survive, take over their habitats. Aye-aye thrive on the island that separates them from the mainland but are again threatened when humans arrive. The few known to exist are found in a refuge on the tiny rain-forest island of Nosy Mangabé. The aye-aye looks as though it has been "assembled from bits of other animals." The most extraordinary features are a middle finger that looks like a long, dead twig and enormous eyes.

Baiji

The Yangtze River dolphin, Lipotes vexillifer, is in legend the reincarnation of a drowned princess, first discovered in 1914 in a lake and since the 1950s encountered along a 200-km. stretch of in the crowded, polluted Yangtze River centered at Tongling in Anhui Province. In the late 1950s the baiji begin being...