Kangaroo Facts What is a Kangaroo?

Kangaroos are large, fast, and agile hopping marsupial animals with a distinctive triangular body shape, large hind legs, small forelimbs, and a long, thick tail. Their fur colour can range from orange-brown to grey to dark brown. Kangaroos can grow to 2 meters and weigh 90 kilograms. They can hop at speeds of up to 70 kilometres per hour and leap as high as 4 meters. Male kangaroos are larger than females, and only female kangaroos have a pouch in which they carry their young. Kangaroos cannot hop at low speeds. So, they walk on five legs! Yes, that's right. Besides using their front limbs and rear legs, they also use their tails as a leg. This unique way of walking is called pentapedaling locomotion.

Kangaroos belong to the scientific animal group Macropodidae (Macropod means 'big foot’ in Greek). Only the four largest species in this group are called kangaroos. These are the Red Kangaroo, Eastern Grey Kangaroo, Western Grey Kangaroo, and Antilopine Kangaroo. The word 'Kangaroo' is pronounced Can-ga-roo.

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Kangaroo Description What Do Kangaroos Look Like?

Kangaroos are large herbivorous marsupials that hop on their hind legs. They have a deer-like head and face with a long, narrow snout and large, swivelling ears. Their eyes are positioned high on their heads, giving them an impressive 324° field of view. Kangaroos have excellent hearing abilities and can detect sounds up to 2 kilometres away.

Kangaroos have four sets of front incisor teeth for shearing grass or leaves and four sets of large molars at the back of their mouths for grinding their food. Four sets of replacement teeth grow during the animal's lifetime, after which lost teeth are not replaced. If the animal hasn't died of old age by then, it will eventually die of starvation because it has no teeth left.

Kangaroos have tiny, almost non-existent, vocal cords. A mother communicates with her babies with clicking sounds. An alarmed kangaroo may hiss and growl. A kangaroo may display aggression by making a "ha" sound. A male kangaroo may make a chuckling sound during courtship. Kangaroos also communicate with each other by thumping their feet.

The kangaroo's forelimbs are small and short, with five clawed fingers primarily used for grasping and pulling down branches, grooming and fighting. Interestingly, kangaroos are predominantly left-handed, using their left hand for feeding and grooming. (Did you know that elephants are either left or right-handed?) To keep cool, the kangaroo licks its forelimbs, covering them with saliva, which evaporates and cools its body. Kangaroos also use their arms for crawl-walking, a technique called pentapedaling. They lean forward onto their front limbs, hoist themselves up with their tail and then move their hind legs forward to move at low speeds.

Female kangaroos have a pouch on the front of their bodies where they carry their babies. This is because young kangaroos are born underdeveloped and need to grow before they can survive outside the pouch. After birth, the baby kangaroo crawls up into the pouch, attaches itself to a milk nipple and develops for over four months before it ventures outside. Male kangaroos do not have pouches.

The kangaroo's hind legs are powerful with long, narrow feet, each with four toes. They use their hind legs to hop long distances at high speed, jumping up to three times their own height. As they hop, their legs compress and uncompress, creating and releasing energy to move. Kangaroos usually move both legs together but can move them independently when required. They even make a 180-degree turn in a single hop. However, kangaroos can only make very limited backward hops.

The kangaroo's large and thick tail counterbalances its body, providing stability while hopping and acting as a tripod when standing to prevent it from toppling over. It can bear the full weight of their body when fighting and stores excess fat, providing energy during times of scarcity. Contrary to popular belief, the kangaroo does not use its tail as a rudder.

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Kangaroo Habitat Where Do Kangaroos Live?

Kangaroos inhabit the temperate to hot climates of Australia, such as open plains, grasslands, deserts, and scrublands. The red kangaroo resides mainly in Australia's arid and semi-arid interior. The eastern grey kangaroo typically inhabits the moist scrublands of the east, south, and south-west regions. The western grey kangaroo is found in grasslands and open woodlands in southern Australia. Conversely, the antilopine kangaroo prefers tropical forests with grassy ground cover in the northern regions.

Kangaroos are nocturnal animals and are most active around dawn and dusk. They move around in small social groups called 'mobs' or 'troops'.

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Kangaroo Diet What Do Kangaroos Eat?

Kangaroos are herbivores that feed on various types of vegetation, such as grass, leaves, ferns, flowers, fruit and occasionally moss. They can extract most of the moisture they require from their diet and do not need to drink water often. Consequently, a kangaroo can survive for months without drinking water.

Kangaroos have a chambered stomach, similar to horses, that includes a U-shaped fore-stomach. This fore-stomach helps to digest fibrous plant material that is too tough for other animals to digest. Kangaroos regurgitate their food, chew it again and swallow it. This process helps break down the tough fibres in their diet and enhances digestion.

Kangaroos prefer feeding at night but also graze early in the morning and late evening when the temperature is cooler. During the hotter parts of the day, they usually rest in the shade. Kangaroos possess an exceptional ability to sense changes in weather and can detect rainfall from as far as 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) away. They instinctively move towards the rain because they know that new growths of grasses will emerge after the rain.

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Kangaroo Reproduction Kangaroo Babies

Kangaroos, being marsupials, give birth to very undeveloped young. The newborn kangaroo baby is no larger than a jelly bean (2 cm or 0.79in) and weighs less than one gram. Using its little arms, the baby joey crawls up its mother's fur and into her pouch.

Once inside its mother's pouch, the joey attaches itself to a nipple in its mother's pouch and stays hidden for about six months. It will then start popping its head out of the pouch and observe the world around it. About two weeks later, it will venture out of the pouch and hop about close to its mother. At about eight months of age, the joey no longer uses its mother's pouch but continues to live with her for up to two years. After which time, the joey becomes totally independent and sets out on its own.

A kangaroo reaches sexual maturity at around 16 months for females and 24 months for males. They have no fixed breeding period, but they mate more often when food is plentiful than when food is scarce. Kangaroos live for 22-25 years.

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Do Kangaroos Throw Their Babies Away? Yes and No

No, kangaroos do not throw their babies. They cannot physically do so with their arms and hands. However, a female kangaroo may eject her baby from her pouch when attacked by a predator. This is to draw the approaching predator to her abandoned baby allowing the female to escape. From a biological perspective, this approach is sound. By sacrificing her baby, the mother saves herself, rather than both mother and baby falling prey to the predator. She can then go on to produce more babies.

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Kangaroo Fighting Do Kangaroos Box?

Kangaroos are not aggressive animals and rarely fight. Instead, fights usually break out over mating rights and are more ritualistic than aggressive. Contrary to popular folklore, kangaroos do not punch or box as humans do. Instead, male kangaroos fight by kicking their opponent with their powerful hind legs and hitting and clawing with their front paws, which have sharp claws. Very rarely do kangaroos hurt each other during these fights.

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Kangaroo Swimming Can Kangaroos Swim?

Kangaroos are surprisingly adept swimmers! Despite the arid habitats they usually live in, kangaroos are often seen swimming in oceans or wading in rivers and watering holes. Their swimming skills are achieved by "dog-paddling" with all four limbs. Kangaroos often flee into watering holes and rivers when threatened.

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Kangaroo Drowning Dog

A kangaroo may flee into waterways to escape attackers such as a dog or dingo. If the predator follows the kangaroo into the water. In that case, the kangaroo may use its strong arms to grab its assailant and hold it underwater till it drowns. There have been no reports of kangaroos drowning people because a person would be pretty foolish to follow a kangaroo into water.

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Kangaroo Predators and Threats

Kangaroos are generally safe from predators due to their size and powerful kicks; however, young kangaroos can be vulnerable to eagles, dingoes, foxes and some dog breeds. If pursued by a predator, kangaroos may attempt flight into waterways and may use their clawed forepaws to grab and drown the assailant. Kangaroos rarely succumb to illnesses in their natural habitats. Droughts, motor vehicle accidents, hunting and intentional culling by the government have caused the highest mortality rates for this species.

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How Many Kangaroos in Australia? Are Kangaroos Endangered?

With an estimated population of 50-60 million, kangaroos are not considered endangered. The ICUN lists them as an animal of "least concern". However, because of their large numbers and the severe crop damage they cause, the government allows the culling and harvesting of 1-2 million animals each year.

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Extinct Kangaroos

The procoptodon was a giant short-faced kangaroo that stood about 2m tall and weighed as much as 240kg. It was too heavy to hope and probably walked on its hind legs. It lived in semi-arid areas of South Australia and New South Wales and had a diet of leaves from trees and shrubs. The procoptodons became extinct between 45,000 and 18,000 years ago. They seem to have become extinct after the arrival of humans. Their extinction may have been caused by human hunting, or by human fire-based deforestation in Australia.

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