A collection
Australian Wildlife
The strange and isolated fauna of the world's oldest island continent — marsupials, monotremes, and one wolf-striped ghost.
Australia broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana roughly 100 million years ago and has been drifting in isolation ever since, which is why so much of its wildlife exists nowhere else and resembles nothing else. Marsupials raise their young in pouches; monotremes lay eggs and nurse them; a single continent produced animals that hop on two legs, detect prey by electric field, produce cube-shaped droppings, and — until a single human lifetime ago — hunted in the shape of a striped wolf. The species in this collection are drawn from across that isolation: the deserts of the interior, the eucalyptus forests of the east, the rivers of Tasmania. Several are flagship conservation species; one, the thylacine, is a reminder that isolation offers no protection once humans arrive.
