By the end of that year, the zoo featured deer, badgers, gray foxes, and Rocky Mountain goats.

On May 23, 1958, Mary Heibner, a ten-year-old girl from Waukegan, Illinois, was mauled by a bear at the zoo.

[4] In November 1959, due to overcrowding, the Como Park Zoo relocated a two-year-old Siberian tiger to Racine.

The lights were the creation of George H. and Jessie May Wheary, who held the display at their home in North Bay from 1962 to 1982.

The Australian division of S.C. Johnson & Son, whose headquarters are in Racine, gifted six kangaroos and six wallaroos to the zoo in 1987.

The zoo operated as a free-admission attraction until January 1, 2007, when fiscal needs required the introduction of an admission fee.

[8] On February 10, 2011, Julie, the oldest patas monkey in recorded history, died at the Racine Zoo, where she had been born and spent almost all of her life.