Wombats are Weird

Wombats are for sure an odd mammal, which probably isn't surprising if you know they're native to Australia. Not as odd as the platypus, the only mammal that lays eggs and is able to shock or poison its prey while also looking like a cute duck-beaver hybrid. Don't worry, if you want to learn more about the odd, but somehow majestic poison-electric type duck-beaver thing, we will cover it for you too, just not in today's post.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately if you wanted to learn about something that sounds more like a fictional character than a real animal, the wombat is a little more normal than that, but it's still an interesting mammal that has some characteristics not found in other mammals. Despite looking like an oversized rodent mixed with a raccoon, the wombat is not a rodent, nor is it in the raccoon family. Wombats are actually classified as marsupials. What is a marsupial? This means that the wombat has a pouch in which its young develops-similar to a kangaroo or koala. Marsupials are a little weird because their babies do most of their development in their pouch instead of inside of them like most other mammals. The odd thing about the wombat specifically, is that instead of the pouch facing forward like most other marsupials, the wombat pouch faces backwards. This is likely an evolutionary thing that occurred to protect the baby wombats. Imagine trying to grow but being exposed to dirt, roots, sand, bugs, and potentially bacteria constantly because you're facing the same way as the debris if moving as your mother digs. Maybe the baby survives, maybe it's smothered by debris, or maybe it gets exposed to something that either kills it or irritates it to no end. Doesn't sound pleasant does it?

Something else that is odd and unique to wombats is that their feces is cube shaped. Why? That's even weirder. It has been determined that there are two stiff areas around the intestines of the wombat that cause the shape and that the cube shaped fecal matter is more likely to help a woman attract a mate. These areas have different musculature around them, unlike human intestines that are pretty much uniform from the small intestine to the large intestine. To be clear, wombats will stack their fecal matter in order to attract mates-so, whereas "regular" intestine shaped fecal matter is more likely to roll, cubes will not. An adult wombat produces between 80 and 100 pieces of feces per night and 4 to 8 pieces per bowel movement. So, it makes sense through mating selection that the cube shaped fecal matter is the gene that gets selected over "regular" shaped fecal matter.

Based on the diet of the wombat, we would assume that it looks something akin to something between a rodent's and horse's fecal shape. Even stranger, someone decided to study how the cube shaped feces produced by wombats is formed which is why we have the previously mentioned information. Apparently, in 2019, Patricia Young and David Hu won the Ig Nobel Prize for physics as a result of their research. To be clear, they were the ones who discovered that the intestines are the reason that wombat feces is shaped the way that it is shaped. Prior to this study, it was believed that the shape of wombat feces was caused by something happening at the "point of exit." We're not sure if that's better or worse than the truth, because it doesn't sound pleasant to us either way.

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