Black rhino Layla gets a forklift-aided CT scan in Brookfield

BROOKFIELD, Ill. - The forklift in the rhino enclosure and the team of at least 40 people around it were some of the signs that Tuesday, May 15, was not a normal day at Brookfield Zoo.

So was the bellow that came from the general direction of Layla, the zoo's 7 1/2-year-old eastern black rhinoceros with profound dental issues. That noise, Dr. Michael Adkesson, the zoo's vice president of clinical medicine, confirmed, was the tranquilizer dart striking the animal in a leg, where the skin is thinner.

For the next four or five hours, aided by a subsequent IV anesthesia drip, Layla would be off in whatever dreamland it is that rhinos visit. She would become, for the second time, the first living rhino to undergo a CT scan, and she would have a second, groundbreaking head surgery to deal with life-threatening infection and nasal blockage resulting from an impacted, unerupted molar.

"This has