Tapirs, too, are solitary animals, though they are shy, retiring creatures which do not defend or maintain territories.

***** Tapirs are browsing animals, with a short prehensile snout and pig-like form that appears to have changed little in 20 million years.

Tapirs are lophodonts, and their cheek teeth have distinct lophs ( ridges ) between protocones, paracones, metacones and hypocones.

Tapirs are mainly active at night, though they are not exclusively nocturnal.

Tapirs are herbivores, and eat a wide range of plants, including leaves, grasses, and bromeliads.

But for the most part, Mountain Tapirs are shy and lead solitary lives, spending their waking hours foraging for food on their own along well-worn tapir paths.

Among South America's extant, native land animals, only the Baird's and South American Tapirs are heavier than this species.

Elsewhere there are armadillos, South American Tapirs and Plains Viscachas, as well as birds ( more than 340 species ).

Image: tapir singapore zoo. JPG | Tapirs

Other species in the Zoo's collection include Red Pandas, Meerkats, Bactrian Camels, Oriental Small-Clawed Otters, South American Tapirs, Aardvarks, Mountain Zebras, Bongo, Red River Hogs, Cottontop Tamarins, Spider Monkeys, Bornean Orangutans, Great Grey Owls, Barn Owls, Von der Decken's Hornbill, Rainbow Lorikeets, Ostriches, American Flamingos, Common Peafowl, Emu, Eastern White Pelicans, Aldabran Tortoises, Egyptian Tortoises, Nile Monitor Lizards, Royal Pythons, Tiger Salamanders, White's Tree Frogs, African Land Snails, Hissing Cockroaches and many more.

Genetic studies have shown that the Mountain Tapirs diverged from its closest relative, the Brazilian Tapir, in the late Pliocene, around three million years ago.

Tapirs inhabit jungle and forest regions of South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia.

Tapirs often exhibit the flehmen response, a posture in which they raise their snouts and show their teeth to detect scents.

Tapirs have brachyodont, or low-crowned, teeth that lack cement.

Tapirs have brown eyes, often with a bluish cast to them, which has been identified as corneal cloudiness, a condition most commonly found in Malayan tapirs.

Tapirs have simple stomachs, and, like horses, ferment food in a large cecum.

Tapirs near a water source will swim, sink to the bottom and walk along the riverbed to feed, and have been known to submerge themselves under water to allow small fish to pick parasites off their bulky bodies.

Tapirs will spend many of their waking hours foraging along well-worn trails, snouts to the ground in search of food.

Elephant Odyssey's other animal exhibits include African lions, jaguars, Baird's Tapirs, guanacos, capybaras, Kirk's Dik-diks, secretary birds, dung beetles, water beetles, desert tarantulas, toads, newts, turtles, frogs, dromedary camels, pronghorn, horses, burros, llamas, rattlesnakes, and for the first time at the Zoo, the California condor.

Tapirs mark out their territories by spraying urine on plants, and they often follow distinct paths which they have bulldozed through the undergrowth.

Mountain Tapirs reach sexual maturity at age three and have lived up to 27 years in captivity.

When around other members of their species, Mountain Tapirs communicate through high-pitched whistles, and the males occasionally fight over estrous females by trying to bite each other ’ s rear legs.

Male Mountain Tapirs will frequently mark their territory with dung piles, urine, and rubbings on trees, and females will sometimes engage in these behaviors as well.

Other notable mammal species in the Zoo's collection include Amur Leopards, Jaguars, Wolverines, Oriental Small-clawed Otters, Asian Lions, Meerkats, Sun Bears, Sumatran Tigers, Giant Anteaters, Aardwolves, African Wild Dogs, Grevy's Zebras, Greater One-horned Rhinoceros, Bongo, Red River Hogs, North American Porcupines, Pygmy Hippopotamus, Malayan Tapirs, Warthogs, Patagonian Sea Lions, Black Howler Monkeys, White-faced Saki Monkeys, Golden-headed Lion Tamarins, Geladas, Barbary Macaques and Pygmy Marmosets.

These roads are largely of less than highway standards, and usually carry traffic which is related to use of the National Forests.

Lands in this last category are situated largely in the mountainous portions of the Eastern States.

These increased costs are partially offset by a decrease of $56 million in expenditures for the reserve forces, largely because of the planned reduction in strength of the Army Reserve components during 1961.

The decreases, which are largely in construction and in aircraft procurement, are offset in part by increases for research and development and for procurement of other military equipment such as tanks, vehicles, guns, and electronic devices.

One should keep in mind that many of the exciting possiblities of roleplaying are largely unexplored and have not been used in industry to the extent that they have been in military and other areas.

Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived ; ;

One of the significant developments in American-Jewish life is that the cultural consumers are largely the women.

Moreover, prudence alone would indicate that, unless the local customs are already ready to fall when pushed, the results of direct economic action everywhere upon national chain stores will likely be simply to give undue advantage to local and state stores which conform to these customs, leading to greater decentralization and local autonomy within the company, or even ( as the final self-defeat of an unjust application of economic pressure to correct injustice ) to its going out of business in certain sections of the country ( as, for that matter, the Quakers, who once had many meetings in the pre-Civil War South, largely went out of business in that part of the country over the slavery issue, never to recover a large number of southern adherents ).

Housewives are finding literally hundreds of ways of getting the maximum use out of traditional designs, says Mr. Alden and they are doing it largely because Colonial craftsmen had `` an innate sense of the practical ''.

The western terrestrial garter snake ( Thamnophis elegans ) in California is largely aquatic and depends heavily on two species of frog that are diminishing in numbers, the Yosemite toad ( Bufo canorus ) and the mountain yellow-legged frog ( Rana muscosa ), putting the snake's future at risk.

The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

Much like the relationship between British English and American English, the Austrian and German varieties differ in minor respects ( e. g., spelling, word usage and grammar ) but are recognizably equivalent and largely mutually intelligible.

Some churches founded outside the Anglican Communion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, largely in opposition to the ordination of openly homosexual bishops and other clergy are usually referred to as belonging to the Anglican realignment movement, or else as " orthodox " Anglicans.

His reception remained warmer in America than Britain, and he continued to publish novels and short stories, but by the late 1930s the audience for Milne's grown-up writing had largely vanished: he observed bitterly in his autobiography that a critic had said that the hero of his latest play (" God help it ") was simply " Christopher Robin grown up ... what an obsession with me children are become!

Police brutality allegedly still goes largely unreported, while observers note that defendants are often beaten to extract confessions and are denied visits from relatives and lawyers.

But, such complete secret languages are rare, because the speakers usually have some public language in common, on which the argot is largely based.

Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace Line that divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts, one in which animals closely related to those of Australia are common, and one in which the species are largely of Asian origin.

The Andaman forests are largely unspoiled, despite logging and the demands of the fast-growing population driven by immigration from the Indian mainland.

The most striking feature is the existence of two great lines of depression, due largely to the subsidence of whole segments of the Earth's crust, the lowest parts of which are occupied by vast lakes.