Back by popular demand, the Brookfield Zoo's Hairy-nosed Wombat joey returns to ZooBorns for a second round of adorable wombatitude. Hairy-nosed Wombats are the smallest and most social of all wombat species. Once found throughout a large range in Southern Australia, today the population has been fragmented into a patchwork by human development. The resulting reduced genetic variation makes the species more suspectible to disease. The Brookfield Zoo has exhibited this species for decades and, in fact, was home to the oldest documented Hairy-Nosed Wombats in the world, Carver, who lived to be 34, and his mother, Vicky, who lived to be 24. See the earlier shots here.

Photo credits: Chicago Zoological Society's Brookfield Zoo