Plan Your Visit to Edinburgh Zoo
We are open every day of the year, including Christmas Day, from 9am until:
| 6.00pm | April - Sept. |
| 5.00pm | Oct. & March |
| 4.30pm | Nov. - Feb. |
How you can help
The natural world needs our help...and we need yours! Please consider making a donation to support our conservation, education and research work, both within our parks and across the world.
How do we know beavers were once in Scotland
Fossil beavers are rare in Scotland, because the conditions for the preservation of bone are poor, except in limestone cave areas, and efforts to find fossils of this kind have been much less in the west of Scotland.
However, radiocarbon dates of fossil skulls and wood gnawed by beavers span more than 2,500 to almost 8,000 years.
The historical record shows that beavers were formerly commercially exploited in Scotland and may have survived around Loch Ness until at least the early 16th century, but intriguingly a Gaelic name for the beaver, losleathan or dobhran losleathan (broad-tail or broad-tailed otter), survived as an oral tradition until the late 18th/early 19th century in Lochaber, Argyll, which suggests that the beaver may have survived in the west of Scotland until much more recently.