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Toronto Zoo Gorilla Dies
Samantha, the Toronto Zoo’s eldest female gorilla, has died, according to a press release issued this morning [PDF]. Samantha was euthanized after suffering her second stroke. (The first, which occurred in July, left the right side of her body paralyzed.) “I will particularly miss her ‘singing’ at breakfast and dinner, and those purrs and rumbles she made that were like music to the soul,” Matt Stephenson, a gorilla keeper, is quoted as saying in the release. Samantha is survived by the seven other members of the Zoo’s gorilla troop.