Wombats Poop Cubes. Science Has Thoughts About This.
Meet the wombat: a pudgy, burrowing marsupial from Australia that minds its own business, eats grass, and ? oh yes ? poops perfect little cubes. Not sort-of-cube-ish. Actual cubes. About 80 to 100 of them per night. No other animal on Earth does this, and for a long time, nobody could explain how.
Scientists eventually figured it out, and it took some impressive commitment to the question. The secret lies in the wombat's unusually long intestines, which take about 150 hours to process food. The last section of the intestine has varying elasticity ? some parts are stretchier than others ? and this difference in wall tension is what sculpts the poop into its distinctly geometric shape. It's essentially nature's slowest 3D printer.
As for why? Wombats use their droppings to mark territory. Cube-shaped poop is far less likely to roll away on uneven ground, making it a much more reliable communication device than your average cylindrical deposit. Evolution, apparently, will engineer a solution to any problem ? including keeping your messages from rolling down a hill.
The research won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019, which celebrates science that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. Which is basically the wombat's whole brand.
More from Weird Facts
Weird Facts
Humans Glow in the Dark, Just Too Faintly to See
Your body is emitting real visible-spectrum photons right now ? not heat, actual light ? but detecting it requires a camera sensitive enough to spot a candle from 10 miles away.
Weird Facts
Polar Bears Are Not Actually White — They're Transparent
Polar bear fur isn't white at all — every single hair is colorless and hollow, like a tiny fiber optic cable, and the skin underneath is completely black.
Weird Facts
T-Rex Never Met a Stegosaurus ? They Missed Each Other by 80 Million Years
The Stegosaurus went extinct roughly 83 million years before T-Rex even existed, making those two famous dinosaurs more separated in time than T-Rex and you.
Weird Facts
Honey Never Expires (And We Mean Never)
Archaeologists cracking open ancient Egyptian tombs have found 3,000-year-old honey still perfectly edible ? turns out honey is basically the immortal snack of the food world.