1 animals
Lasiorhinus
The wombat is the only animal on Earth that produces cube-shaped droppings, and it is less a curiosity than a solution. The cubes are moulded by the intestine itself, whose walls vary in elasticity around their circumference — stretching in some places, staying stiff in others — so the drying faeces are pressed into flat-sided blocks. The point is that cubes do not roll: a wombat stacks them on rocks and logs as scent markers, and a round pellet would simply tumble off. Nearly everything else about the animal is built around digging. Its pouch faces backwards, so a burrowing mother does not pack it with soil — the same solution the koala uses, and the reverse of a kangaroo's. Its rump is a slab of thickened skin and cartilage, and when a predator follows it into a tunnel the wombat plugs the entrance with its own backside and can crush the attacker's skull against the roof. Its metabolism is extraordinarily slow, taking as long as a fortnight to digest a meal — an adaptation to poor, dry forage and a way of wringing every last drop of water out of its food.
