Everybody loves a cuddly face like this one—which explains why people have given so much money to conservation groups to save giant pandas and other megafauna like tigers, leopards, and mountain gorillas. "Cute" animals like these are the cash cows of the conservation movement; we pull out our checkbooks for the faces we find most adorable. For many years, conservation efforts tended to focus on individual endangered species—the white rhino, the gray wolf—that could be easily marketed to the cute-loving public. However effective these programs may have been, they gave short shrift to ugly, endangered, and genetically distinct animals like the aye-aye.