Weird Animals of Australia: Why Down Under is so Unique

Across the world, Australia is known as the land of whacky animals. So, how did we get this reputation?

Well, lets look at our mammals. Worldwide there are 3 types, placentals, monotremes, and marsupials.

Most of the mammals in the world are but Australia is kinda different. We are the only continent on earth with all 3 types but also the only continent where marsupials dominate the landscape.

About 250 million years ago Australia was part of a much bigger island called Gondwana. Gondwana contained most of the land in the southern hemisphere and plenty of wildlife. Over time Gondwana started breaking up, one by one continents split and about 40-50 million years ago Australia was left on it's own.

While in the gondwana days there were marsupials all over the place over the years they started to disappear and placentals came to dominate every continent except Australia.

Over time marsupials started to evolve into all different shapes and sizes and because they were so far away from the rest of the world they morphed into something completely unique.

Around 100,000 years ago animals were big and I mean real big. We had giant kangaroos known as procoptodon that grew up to 2 metres, an enormous wombat called diprotodon that weighed about 2000 kilos and Megalania which was a ginormous 5 metre lizard.

But about 50,000 years ago these big animals start to disappear. Now there's still debate as to why they died out whether it was hunting, global warming, or more likely a combination of both but that's a different story.

Over the years Australia's climate became progessively drier and more arid. As well as this, we didn't really have any huge earthquakes or volcanoes to bring in fertile soil and eventually Australia became a pretty tough place to live.

One theory is that only animals that didn't use much energy, and didn't need heaps of food were able to survive.

So marsupials were able to make some energy saving adaptions like hopping on two legs and shrinking in size or changing their teeth to suit the food here.

They did have one advantage and that was a lack of big predators hunting them down. There was one cat like predator, the thylacoleo, and also a carnivorous kangaroo but they died out with the megafauna.
Then there was the Thylacine the world's only marsupial wolf, which was wiped out on the mainland when dingoes arrived 4000 years ago.

So basically, Australian animals have been doing their own thing for a long time, completely unsupervised.

And that's made us a living laboratory of evolutions quirkiest and coolest concoctions...way to go evolution!
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