wombat

The word wombat comes from the Dharug language of the Sydney region, where wambad, wambat, or wombach named the large burrowing marsupial now known to science as Vombatus ursinus and its relatives. The Dharug people of the Sydney basin inhabited country that included the Blue Mountains foothills, the Cumberland Plain, and the coastal ranges where wombats were common; they had detailed ecological knowledge of the animal's burrowing habits, its nocturnal foraging patterns, its relationship with the grasses and roots it fed on, and its role in the landscape. Wombat burrows — sometimes extending to thirty metres in length — are significant landscape features, providing shelter for dozens of other species and aerating and mixing soils that would otherwise compact. The Aboriginal understanding of the wombat was embedded in a broader understanding of how the animal functioned in country.

European settlers encountered the wombat in the Sydney region almost immediately after the establishment of the colony, and the Dharug name was recorded and adopted within the first years of settlement. John Hunter, the second governor of New South Wales, sent a wombat specimen to London in the 1790s, and the animal's description was published in scientific literature using the Dharug name. The creature caused considerable anatomical astonishment in Europe: it is a marsupial whose pouch opens backward — toward the rump rather than toward the head — an adaptation that prevents the pouch from filling with soil during digging. Female wombats carry their joeys for six to ten months, and the young wombats then emerge into a world they must navigate largely alone, as the mother is not particularly attentive by mammalian standards.

The wombat's most extraordinary anatomical distinction — the one that has generated the greatest scientific curiosity in recent decades — is the production of cubic feces. Wombats are the only animals known to science that defecate in the shape of cubes. The mechanism was a subject of some speculation until 2021, when researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and other institutions demonstrated that the wombat intestine achieves the cubic shape through differential elasticity in the intestinal walls — some sections stretch more than others, producing corners rather than curves in the forming feces. Wombats deposit these cubes on prominent rocks and logs to mark territory; a cubic pellet does not roll, which means territorial markers stay in place. The physics paper documenting this received the Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.

In contemporary culture, the wombat has achieved a degree of internet celebrity disproportionate to its ecological significance — the cubic feces discovery circulated widely on social media, the animals' solid, rotund, apparently imperturbable appearance generates consistent affection in wildlife videos, and the species has become a symbol of Australian wildlife in popular international media. The Dharug word travels with all of this: wombat appears in children's books worldwide, in wildlife documentaries, in the taxonomic literature, and on the feeds of millions of people who have never visited Australia and never will. The Dharug name for a burrowing marsupial has become, improbably and joyfully, one of the internet's favorite words.