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DIED 18 MAY 2004 · FRANKE PARK
The animal: For a time, the rarest address in the animal world was a zoo enclosure in Franke Park. The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo — opened 3 July 1965, renamed the Fort Wayne Zoo on 1 January 2025 — was home over the years to twelve Tasmanian devils, the most of any zoo in the United States. When Australia banned the export of the endangered species, the zoo's remaining devil became a population of one planet-wide significance: Coolah, seven and a half years old, who died on 18 May 2004 of complications of inoperable cancer — at his death, the last Tasmanian devil living anywhere outside Australia. The mark is the zoo's own record, kept in its compiled history and carried in the Local Animals section with the zoo's other national marks: the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan Asmara, born at the zoo on 22 November 2014, and Bill the lion, euthanized 6 April 2016, stand in the same entry.
Sources: the Local Animals section of this history — the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo record as compiled in the zoo's history (the 1965 opening; the twelve devils; Coolah, 18 May 2004; Asmara, 22 November 2014; Bill, 6 April 2016; the 2025 renaming).