Shooting Craps: The Wombat

Wombats are cute little Australian animals. Their long teeth make them look like rodents, but in reality they’re marsupials, relatives of koalas and kangaroos.

Marsupials differ from mammals like dogs and cats in a number of ways, but the most important way is that wombat fetuses have a simple placenta that doesn’t provide enough nutrition for a large fetus. The joeys have to get out so early that they can’t live outside the mother’s body. After the joeys are born they have to make the arduous climb into their mama’s special pouch, where they will keep warm and drink milk until they’re big enough to live outside.

Wombat pouches are unique among marsupials. While kangaroo pouches open at the top, wombat pouches open at the bottom. Wombats like to dig. If they had a normal pouch, it would scoop up dirt.

According the the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, bare-nosed wombats are about the size of a medium size dog.

Bare-nosed wombats average 1 m [39 inches] in length and 27 kg [50 pounds] in weight yet can reach up to 1.2 m [47 inches] in length and up to 35 kg [77 pounds] in weight. The Tasmanian wombat is not as large or bulky, averaging 85 cm [33 inches] in length and 20 kg [48 pounds] in weight, while the Flinders Island wombat is smaller still averaging only 75 cm [30 inches] in length.

Now about the dice.

Wombats have particularly long, flexible intestines. It takes up to 12 days for poop to traverse the wombat’s digestive tract, and it is wrung dry during the trip. The result is that wombat poop is unique: it’s cubic like dice. No other animal in the world poops dice!