Nat Geo – Wombats are a burrowing animal native to Australia perhaps best-known for being, well, pudgy—and quite cute. But there’s something you might not know about these adorable marsupials: Wombats are the only animals in the world that produce cube-shaped poop.
While this peculiarity has sparked much interest and debate, actual research into the intricacies of wombat scat has been scant. That’s left scientists largely in the dark about the phenomenon – until recently.
Earlier this year, Patricia Yang, a researcher at the George Institute of Technology who specializes in bodily fluids, started to look into the topic more closely after hearing about it at a conference.
“I didn’t really believe it,” Yang says. But after confirming that it is, indeed, a fact, she began trying to figure out why, and how, wombats poop in cubes.
This is literally some next level shit folks. Wombats poop cubes. That’s just a fact, yet despite the brain power of all of the animal poop scientists in the world, no one could really explain why. That is until recently, when poop scientist Patricia Yang took a special interest in the wombat and their geometrically unique shit and went on a quest for the truth.
What she found was not that wombats are packing weird square shaped assholes or have a digestive tract that looks like it belongs in a Lego movie. You see, wombats live in Australia and it’s really dry there. Due to that fact, wombats get a lot of their liquids from food so they squeeze all the water out of their poop before they release it out of their bodies. I guess when your poop is dry it comes out more unique shapes. That’s what the poop scientists say, but there’s also a lot more to it.
That sick fuck Patricia Yang was so into studying these poop cubes she actually arranged to study the intestines of 2 wombats that had been hit by cars. Turns out wombats have some grooves in their intestines that might start the shaping process. It still doesn’t explain how their butthole doesn’t crush their square poop back into little balls or more normal poop shapes. That’s the beauty of science though. Patricia Yang isn’t gonna sleep until she figures this shit out.
At the end of the day, we’re just gonna have to wait and see what her research finds. When I woke up this morning, I knew nothing about wombats and I knew even less about the shape of their poops. I knew they were a thing but also part of me might have thought they were more of a legend like Bigfoot or Pocahontas, so you can imagine how excited I was when I caught this headline. Now I’m not certain I’ll ever go a day without thinking about wombat poop for the rest of my life, but that’s just the path I’ve chosen to follow. It’s too late to go back now.
Lepota and The Hound 