we know about a lot of animals, but not about all of them. we often hear about ' new ' species. perhaps one of the most interesting of these new species is the okapi. people in the congo ( now the democratic republic of congo ) talked about them a long time ago, but other people did not know about them before 1901. okapis have wonderful red-brown coats, and black and white legs. they have long blue tongues too europeans wanted to hunt and kill okapis, but not all of them died. you can now see okapis in many zoos, and thousands live in the east of the democratic republic of congo. sometimes species disappear and then, after a long time, somebody sees them again. this is very exciting for animals lovers. golden hamsters come from syria, but many years ago they all disappeared. then, in 1930, a scientist looked for them and found fifteen - a mother hamster and her babies. some of them died, and some ran away, but some of them had babies. the young hamsters went to zoos in different countries and now there are millions of them. nobody found golden hamsters in syria again for forty years, and today there are no wild hamsters there. but children in many different countries have hamsters now in their homes. between the 1880 and the 1940, people cut down a lot of the trees in the south of the USA, and the ivory-billed woodpecker disappeared. it was the biggest and most beautiful woodpecker in the USA and people looked foe it for sixty years. but they did not find one. was it extinct? then, in 2004, they saw it again, about seven times. perhaps it was one bird, perhaps two or three different birds, but the ivory-billed woodpecker is alive and well. or is it? scientists cannot agree about this, and people are still waiting for a good photograph of the bird. we humans live in one world with animals. we know a lot about this world, but we do not know everything. we look for new and interesting animals because we can learn from them. we are finding them, but at the same time we are losing many more. we change things in our world quickly, but animals change very slowly. many of them are going to disappear soon. we must help them because our home is their home too.