If you thought Mother Nature had no sense of humor, get ready to learn the animal kingdom’s best-kept secret… and real-life Minecraft! Australian 😂. Some animals leave footprints. The wombat leaves dice.
Meet the wombat, an adorable Australian marsupial with the face of a chubby stuffed animal and a biological ability found nowhere else on planet Earth: it’s the only living creature capable of pooping perfectly geometric cubes.
Up to 100 cubes a day, each about two centimeters across, and with no opening in sight. For years, nobody knew how it did it, until mechanical engineer Patricia Yang of the Georgia Institute of Technology and her team decided to look inside: they dissected two wombats and studied the texture and structure of their intestinal tissue. Then they built a mathematical model to see how the organ expands and contracts during digestion.
The explanation fits in a picture: an elastic band held at both ends, with the center sagging. According to Yang, the stiff and elastic parts of the intestine contract at different speeds, and that mismatch creates the cube shape and its corners.
But the mystery doesn’t end in the intestine. After each bowel movement, the wombat picks up its cubes and places them around its territory. Since these little animals have pretty poor eyesight, they communicate through smell. To mark their territory and make sure the message carries far, they place their droppings in elevated spots, such as rocks or fallen logs. If their ‘little gifts’ were round, they would roll down the hill. Thanks to their cube shape, they stay perfectly stacked like Lego bricks without moving! 🧱🤣
An animal that could have left anything lying around chose to turn its excrement into carefully arranged messages.