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The mammals of Australia have a rich fossil history, as well as a variety of extant mammalian species, dominated by the marsupials, but also including monotremes and placentals. The marsupials evolved to fill specific ecological niches, and in many cases they are physically similar to the placental mammals in Eurasia and North America that ...
Wildlife of Australia. A total of 386 species of mammals have been recorded in Australia and surrounding continental waters: 364 indigenous and 22 introduced. [1] The list includes 2 monotremes, 154 marsupials, 83 bats, 69 rodents (5 introduced), 10 pinnipeds, 2 terrestrial carnivorans (1 recent introduction, and 1 prehistoric introduction), 13 ...
Wildlife of Australia. The red kangaroo is the largest extant macropod and is one of Australia's heraldic animals, appearing with the emu on the coat of arms of Australia. [1] The fauna of Australia consists of a large variety of animals; some 46% of birds, 69% of mammals, 94% of amphibians, and 93% of reptiles that inhabit the continent are ...
Australia is home to two of the five extant species of monotremes and the majority of the world's marsupials (the remainder are from Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia and the Americas). The taxonomy is somewhat fluid; this list generally follows Menkhorst and Knight [1] and Van Dyck and Strahan, [2] with some input from the global list, which ...
Thylacoleo carnifex (the marsupial lion) is the largest known carnivorous mammal to have ever lived in prehistoric Australia, and was of comparable size to female placental mammal lions and tigers, It had a catlike skull with large slicing pre-molars, a retractable thumb-claw and massive forelimbs. It was almost certainly carnivorous and a tree ...
Among mammals, bats have distributions that can cross the line, but larger terrestrial mammals are generally limited to one side or the other. On the Australian side, many species of marsupials are present, and some monotremes, alongside native rodents—although the occurrence of rodents in this case is derived from more recent colonization ...
Like other marsupials in the macropod family (such as kangaroos and wallabies), the quokka is herbivorous and mainly nocturnal. [5] The quokka's range is a small area of southwestern Australia. They inhabit some smaller islands off the coast of Western Australia, particularly Rottnest Island just off Perth and Bald Island near Albany. Isolated ...
The koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), sometimes called the koala bear, is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae. Its closest living relatives are the wombats. The koala is found in coastal areas of the island's eastern and southern regions, inhabiting Queensland ...