Tsimbazaza Zoo is a zoo and botanical garden in southern Antananarivo

Antananarivo

Antananarivo , formerly Tananarive , is the capital and largest city in Madagascar. It is also known by its French colonial shorthand form Tana....

, Madagascar

Madagascar

The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...

, located just north of the National Assembly of Madagascar

National Assembly of Madagascar

The Parliament has two chambers. The lower house is the National Assembly .The Assembly has 160 members, elected for a four year term in single-member and two-member constituencies...

 building. The only zoo of its kind in Madagascar, on November 1989, the WWF

World Wide Fund for Nature

The World Wide Fund for Nature is an international non-governmental organization working on issues regarding the conservation, research and restoration of the environment, formerly named the World Wildlife Fund, which remains its official name in Canada and the United States...

 celebrated its tenth year in Madagascar by opening an environmental teaching center at the zoo. (It is said to house "the finest collection of Madagascan wildlife

Wildlife of Madagascar

The wildlife of Madagascar is composed of its flora and fauna. The island has been isolated for about 70 million years. Because of this, a very high proportion of the plants and animals are endemic, occurring nowhere else in the world. Many species are related to those found in mainland Africa but...

", with several unique species on display. The zoo has a museum with collections of tribal carvings and the skeleton of an elephant bird adjoining the skeleton of an ‘ostrich for sale’.In the early 2000s the death rate of lemur

Lemur

Lemurs are a clade of strepsirrhine primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. They are named after the lemures of Roman mythology due to the ghostly vocalizations, reflective eyes, and the nocturnal habits of some species...

s at the zoo was high and was investigated.