↑wombat Photo According to ICh
Today (October 22) is International Wombat Day. This unique Australian animal is particularly familiar with. It is their unique cube feces.
↑Wombat's unique cube excrement
In the BBC documentary " Seven Worlds One Planet " broadcast on CCTV Documentary Channel, we can see the figure of this famous Australian "cute beast": it has the weight of a large dog, the legs are similar to that of a small dog, and walking in the snow one meter deep is quite challenging.
↑The dietary structure of wombats is mostly rich in cellulose and is very healthy. It mainly eats grass, bark and roots, etc. In addition to digging holes, the front teeth are also used to scrape the bark and roots.
wombats have short feet and are well-developed muscles. They mainly live in forests, mountains and heathers in southeast Australia and in Tasmania. The wombats have a very slow metabolism, and they take about two weeks to complete food digestion. They usually do everything slowly, but when they encounter danger, they can escape at a speed of up to 40 kilometers per hour (run faster than humans), and the high-speed running time can last for 90 seconds.
↑Don’t be confused by the cute appearance of the wombats. They have super fast speed (pictured according to IG)
What’s more interesting is that the buttocks of the wombats are as tough as a shield. When they encounter predators such as Tasmania devil , Ding Gou, etc., who look more fierce than themselves, they will quickly drill into the hole, expose their buttocks, and block the hole as a defense. In this way, even if the opponent wants to prey, he will not be able to speak.
Wombats usually like to live in caves. They have extremely strong excavation capabilities and can dig cave systems with complex structures and complete functions. The traffic design of the residence is also at the "master level", which may include interconnected tunnels up to 20 to 30 meters long and have multiple entrances and exits, making it look like an excellent engineer.
↑Wombats are at the entrance of the cave (photo according to Australian Geographic)
has news reports that when wildfires in Australia occurred, wombats generously shared the caves they dug with other wild animals and provided shelter.
"Wombat" is an animal under the order (Diprotodontia) in the Mammals. By wombats, we refer to animals in the family Vombatidae, and are often Tasmanian wombats of . Three different species under the wombat family: Tasmanian wombat, Queensland wombat and nan Australian wombat. Speaking of cute words, I believe most people will vote for the Tasmanian wombats (also the one with the most pictures in this article).
↑Wombats are also marsupials, but their parenting bag is very different, and they are opened in the back. In this way, when the wombat mother digs a hole, it can prevent the soil from splashing into the parenting bag and affecting the wombat. (Photo according to IG)
binocular , now also called " kangaroo ". As the name suggests, they all use parenting bags to feed pups who are not yet motivated. Their ancestors began to evolve 55 million to 26 million years ago and were once the overlords of the Australian continent. After experiencing many ice ages and droughts, they have become very adapted to the environment here.
↑Restoration of biindentus (Photo Author: Peter Trusler)
The legendary biindentus (Diprotodon) is an animal of biindentus biindentus - look at the two large incisors of the wombat, isn't it also "dual incisors". The kinship between bipartite and wombats is relatively close to , both of which are sub-purpose wombats, but the former is much cooler and can be as big as rhino and hippo .
↑The legendary "the largest wombat in the world" (photo according to dailymail.co.uk)
In 2011, scientists discovered a complete biindental skeleton in Queensland, Australia. Scientists have made a recovery from this - it looks like an enlarged version of a cute wombat:
↑ in Melbourne also stores such a skeleton specimen of a bidirectional beast (the one on display is a replica).According to suggest-keywords.com
0,000 years ago, this beast disappeared from Australia. This time coincides with the time when the first batch of humans arrived in Australia. Perhaps it was human hunting that led to the extinction of such large cute herbivores, or perhaps it was the loss of habitat that caused them to lack food and eventually disappeared from the earth. However, in the Australian Aboriginal murals more than 10,000 years ago, the following scenes can be seen:
↑Although there is no reference system... but this cute outline is still very likely to be biindentor (Photo according to CFZ: Daily News-blogger)
biindentor disappeared from Australian history, but the wombat is still there. Its name wombat also comes from the deceased native language Darug.
As for the "cube shit" mentioned at the beginning of the article, although this interesting fact has long been recognized by the scientific community, people have not understood the reason why wombats can pull out cube baits until recent years.
↑Dry wombat feces
Because wombats have the habit of using urine and feces to mark the territory, scientists have previously speculated that the existence of square feces may be to prevent the feces used to mark the territory from rolling around. This idea was later overturned - the wombats didn't need to fix feces at the entrance to declare sovereignty.
↑Picture According to Visit Victoria
Another perspective of thinking is more fully based: the feces of wild wombats are angular cubes, while the feces of wombats raised in the zoo are not particularly standard square.
Comparing zoo wombats and wild wombats, people found that the biggest difference is their water intake in food and drinking water. Wild wombats live in dry grasslands and forests in eastern and southern Australia with little rain. Under the influence of harsh environment, it is difficult for them to consume a lot of water from their daily diet. Their physiological characteristics also produce corresponding reactions driven by natural conditions, and feces shaping is one of them.
. The wombats living under artificial conditions do not have to worry about food and drink. They have a clean water supply and fresh grass to enjoy every day, so feces are no longer a standard cube.
↑ Fresh feces of artificially raised wombats (but still a little bit square)
In 2018, at the fluid mechanics branch venue of the 71st American Physics Annual Meeting, Patricia J. Yang, a Chinese scientist from Hu Lide's Laboratory at Georgia Tech University, published a report, restoring this epic process. Yang's team studied two Tasmanian wombats who died in a car accident and found that the intestines were the core of shaping square feces.
Wombats, like all other mammals, have digestive residues flowed through 92% of the intestines in fluid form before they begin to dehydrate and solidify. The difference is that in cross-section, the large intestine structure of the wombat is not uniform. Their intestines are four-edge, with four angles less elastic, and can only undergo 20% deformation when filled, while the middle part can undergo 75% deformation.
In such a dehydration process, the cube-shaped feces gradually take shape.
Of course, Yang also said that this study still needs to be explored in the future, such as why there are only two, rather than four, grooves in the intestine of wombats, participate in the shaping of feces.
Edit Duan Xueying
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