The Spirit of Australia

That’s what they call Kangaroos – the Spirit of Australia.  When everyone thinks of Australia, they think of Kangaroos but I’ve found from the writings of a younger namesake in Australia, Dr. Tim Flannery, from the Marquarie University in Sydney, that there are 70 species of kangaroo including, get this, a tree kangaroo (see pix); in fact, Flannery says there are 10 species up in the trees eating fruit and leaves.   There are about 57 million of kangaroos across Australia.  They come in red in the desert, and gray in the south and east.   The grays can outrun a horse and they can swim a mile.   There once was a rat kangaroo, now extinct, that ran so fast it appeared to fly.  Worms inhabit their guts to break down the grasses they eat.   

This guy, Flannery, who obsessed over their origins found a tiny piece of “ancient bone” that proved to be the link between an ancient possum and the kangaroos we think we know today. 

 If you love animals and are concerned how to preserve these fauna, then you might enjoy Flannery’s book, “Chasing Kangaroos.”   He first got interested when he was working at a museum, cleaning “the fossilized skeletons of extinct kangaroos that were twice the size of any living species.”  He found that these herbivores once ate flesh and had ape-like faces.  But what has really surprised him is that so few take for granted that almost all kangaroos hop, rather than run, without asking how they evolved so that they could and do hop.