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Vicuña — printable fact sheet
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Vicuña
Vicugna vicugna
The vicuna (Vicugna vicugna) is the wild ancestor of the alpaca and the smallest of the four South American camelids, standing under a metre at the shoulder and weighing around 45 kilograms. It grows the finest natural animal fibre in the world, at roughly 12 microns in diameter…
Did you know?
- The vicuña is the wild ancestor of the domesticated alpaca, and both were revered and protected by the ancient Inca civilization.
- Vicuna wool is about 12 microns thick, finer than cashmere, and a single animal produces only a couple of hundred grams every other year. It is the only even-toed hoofed mammal whose lower incisors grow continuously, like a rodent's. Its blood is packed with unusually small red cells that hold oxygen tightly, which is how it functions at nearly 5,000 metres. The species was saved by reviving an Inca ritual: a communal roundup in which the animals are sheared alive and let go.
What I learned
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