> ‘You are the father’: Maury Povich announces paternity results of Denver Zoo orangutan
‘You are the father’: Maury Povich announces paternity results of Denver Zoo orangutan
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Initially unsure of which orangutan was the father of a new baby primate, the Denver Zoo decided to have a little fun and turned to the paternity announcement guru himself: former daytime talk show host Maury Povich.
Just as he would do on his long-running show, Povich pulled the purported DNA results for 4-month-old Siska out of an envelope and declared: "Berani. You are the father!”
The zoo posted the video on social media this week.
Siska, a female who was born on Aug. 27, is the first baby for Eirina, a 15-year-old Sumatran orangutan, who came to the Denver Zoo from Germany’s Dortmund Zoo in 2016.
Siska's father remained a mystery because the zoo's animal care team had to wait a few months before Eirina was comfortable allowing them to get close enough to get a hair sample from Siska to compare her DNA against 30-year-old Berani and 16-year-old Jaya.
“When I heard we received the results, the first thing that popped into my mind was, ‘Berani, you ARE the father!’” Jake Kubié, the zoo's director of communications, said in an email Thursday.
Sumatran orangutans are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with a rapidly declining wild population due to habitat loss, illegal hunting and the black-market pet trade, the zoo said in announcing Siska’s birth.