Australia has a rich variety of species and many unique animals.
has a very primitive mammal that looks like some kind of hedgehog . Or it is a kind of porcupine , but in fact it is fundamentally different from hedgehogs, porcupines and all other mammals. It is called echidna , which is called a mammal because it has hair outside its skin and because only mammals grow hair. In fact, some of the hairs on the surface of the echidna evolved to be big and hard, and turned into very thick thorns, which is a good protection for echidnas. This hair helps the echidna maintain body temperature and ensures that the body's heat is not lost to the cold air.
The fuel that makes the body produce heat is of course food. In the cold winter, echidna has to spend most of its time looking for food to ensure the body's calorie supply. Although echidnas have keen eyesight and sensitive hearing, they still rely on their sense of smell to find food. They can smell the breath of insects and worms, and then use their very strong claws to split the insect's nests and caves to capture these foods. Its bird-like mouth can poke into the hole, and then spit out a long tongue like a pointed cone, which stretches into cracks and holes to lick the insects that can be obtained. Echidnas especially love to eat ants and termites, and even go to climb trees to eat them.
There is also a strange mammal in the world that is also in Australia. It looks so weird that when people first saw its specimens, it was considered to be faked by humans. This is Platypus . Platypus first appeared on Earth 100 million years ago. From the mouth, it looks like a duck, but its mouth is not as hard as the mouth of a bird, and it is elastic. Like echidnas, platypus feed on small invertebrates, but the invertebrates that platypus love to eat are underwater. After the platypus collects food on the water, they come to the water to chew the food into a paste. The platypus has poor vision underwater, but its mouth has long-distance sensing function. The platypus's shaking mouth is like a sensor inside metal detector , which can capture extremely weak currents emitted by any biological body.
There is also a very common animal in Australia, which is kangaroo . It is very different from the platypus in terms of production methods. It no longer lays eggs, but directly gives birth to small animals without shells. In order to survive, it must crawl into the bag on the mother's abdomen. As the kangaroo grows, the ingredients of the milk flowing out of the mother's nipples have also changed to ensure the nutritional needs of the kangaroo at all stages of the growth period. The kangaroo is a bit like a kangaroo at 9 months. It will take a year until you completely leave parenting bag to live independently.
