Wombats Make Cube Poop and Science Is Here for It

Deep in the Australian bush, the humble wombat is quietly pulling off one of nature's most improbable engineering feats: producing cube-shaped poop. Not roughly square. Not rectangular. Actual cubes. Around 80 to 100 of them per night.

For a long time, nobody could figure out how a round digestive tract produces a shape with corners. It turns out wombat intestines have varying elastic properties — some sections stretch more than others — which effectively sculpts the waste into its distinctive boxy form as it moves through. Engineers were genuinely jealous.

In 2019, a team of researchers won an Ig Nobel Prize (the award for science that makes you laugh, then think) for finally cracking the cube mystery. Their findings have since inspired researchers studying soft-matter manufacturing, because nature, apparently, invented the cube mold long before IKEA did.

As for the wombats themselves, the cubes serve a practical purpose: they stack. Wombats use their droppings to mark territory, and flat-sided cubes don't roll away down hills the way round ones would. It is, in every sense, a drop of genius.