True Facts About Marsupials

Here we will explore true facts about marsupials. Marsupials. Is this really the best shot? It looks like pornography, not nature. Oh, that's better. Marsupials. I just took it in the noodle. Marsupials are metatherians, a group of mammals that split off from our eutherian ancestors over 160 million years ago. They may look like other mammals, but inside marsupials are hiding something that doesn't exist. What? Marsupials lack the ability to grow a placenta, which is an organ that looks a bit like a bloody pillow. It acts as a waste and nutrient exchange and protects the baby from its mother's immune system, which allows human babies, for example, to mature inside the womb. Trust me, the cartoon version is much better looking than the real thing. Lacking the protection of a placenta, marsupial babies have to get the hell out quickly. The kangaroo baby emerges after only seven weeks in the... oh my god, it looks like a dog penis that's trying to escape. Run, little red rocket, run. It is blind, but remarkably has fully functional forelimbs, and it uses them to climb up the mother's midline until it reaches the pouch. It looks like Voldemort at the end of the series. The pouch is a bit like a pocket, but it has nipples in it. The baby latches onto the nipple, and the nipple inflates inside the baby's mouth, forming a seal. For the next 100 days, the baby cannot let go, as it receives milk from its mother. To understand this, imagine putting on a blindfold and sniffing your way across a shag carpet until you found a nipple that was just as large as you were, and then thinking, I should put it in my mouth. That is how a kangaroo do. I'll tell you right now, we are not going to talk about the Tasmanian devil, because that is not a polite way to eat. That's starting at the wrong end of the ice cream cone, if you know what I mean. I know it's in Australia, and they do everything reverse down there, you've heard about the toilets. If you haven't, supposedly the Australian puts his head in the toilet bowl and pees upwards, just the opposite of us. Really? Who does that to a chicken? The wombat is another marsupial. Are you trying to hide? That's effective. Unlike the kangaroo, it has a rear-facing pouch. This is because the wombat digs and lives in burrows. Here we see two wombats, both good at digging, but one is clearly an idiot. On the plus side, if you're a baby, a rear-facing pouch prevents you from getting a mouthful of dirt. On the downside, it means there is a butthole directly in front of your doorway. They kind of break even, really. The marsupial's penis. We always do this. Why? I don't want to talk about their penises. This should be about the majesty of nature. It's like reviewing an opera and, I don't know, talking about Wagner's penis. No, I don't want research to google that, Jerry. Fine. Most marsupials have two-pronged penises, and the female has between two and three vaginas. Which sounds like a math problem, but I mean, we have one-to-one, and it's not like it's not complicated, so now you know. The koala is perhaps the cutest of all the marsupials, but it appears to have received the shorthand of the evolutionary s*** dick. Jerry, don't bleep it like that. It sounds like I said, you don't even have to bleep s*** dick. The koala lives mainly in the eucalyptus tree and almost exclusively eats the eucalyptus leaf. The eucalyptus leaf, on the other hand, has made it clear that it doesn't want to be eaten by anyone. Aside from having very little nutritional value, it is poisonous and very hard to chew and digest. To deal with this, the koala has evolved a very long hindgut, which ferments the leaves, sometimes for over 100 hours. A remarkable and complex adaptation that the koala could have avoided by eating pretty much any other f***ing thing. Baby koalas don't have the fully developed piping to do this hindgut fermentation, so instead they eat their mother's feckle pop. What is that? A little popsicle? Oh, it's two words. Fecal pap. Oh, oh, that's gross. Fecal pap is a pre-digested greenish goo, like you know how a cow regurgitates cud, right? Well, it's like that, except out of your child. The diets of most herbivore marsupials pose another challenge. The coarse grasses and leaves wear down their teeth. Each has evolved a unique strategy to deal with this. The kangaroo has four sets of molars, which move forward as the front pairs wear down. Wombats have rootless teeth that never stop growing. The koala's unique strategy is to have neither of these, so when its teeth wear down, it just starts to death. Not only that, but the koala has the smallest brain-to-body mass ratio of all the mammals, and it has a smooth brain, which means that it hasn't evolved the thinky-thinky parts. For example, if you pick eucalyptus leaves, which it eats, off the branch and put them on a plate, the koala doesn't know what to do with them. Not a genius animal. However, this lack of brain gives the koala a discrete evolutionary advantage, in that it does not give a f**k. Case in point, koala in the rain, no f**ks given. None. Just remember, one day you might find a comfy little place to live, complete with food and shelter. But if you notice that you wake up to a butthole every single day, it might just be time to move on. Something, something, something. Marsupials.