What unique animals live in Australia?

Unique Australian animals include kangaroos, koalas, platypuses, echidnas, wombats, Tasmanian devils, dingoes, emus, kookaburras, lyrebirds, frilled-neck lizards, and many species of possum and wallaby. Australia's long isolation from other continents gave its native fauna time to evolve along distinctive pathways found nowhere else on Earth.

About 87 per cent of Australian mammals, 93 per cent of reptiles, and 94 per cent of frogs are endemic, meaning they live only in Australia. The two great groups that set Australian mammals apart are marsupials, which raise their young in pouches, and monotremes, mammals that lay eggs. The platypus and echidna are the only living monotremes left in the world.

Marsupials include kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, wombats, possums, gliders, Tasmanian devils, and quolls. Many marsupials are nocturnal and rely on the long Australian dry seasons in different ways: koalas survive on a poor eucalyptus diet, kangaroos can suspend pregnancy during drought, and wombats live in deep cool burrows. Bird life is equally distinctive, with the emu (the second-largest living bird), the cassowary, the lyrebird (a master mimic), and the kookaburra (whose call became an Australian shorthand around the world).

Many native species are threatened. European settlement brought introduced predators (cats and foxes), competitors (rabbits, goats, cane toads), and habitat loss that have driven Australia to one of the highest mammal-extinction rates in the world. Recent extinctions include the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger, 1936), the Bramble Cay melomys (declared extinct in 2019, the first mammal extinction attributed to climate change), and several desert bandicoots. Recovery programs at Mulligans Flat, Australian Wildlife Conservancy reserves, and Phillip Island are reintroducing locally lost species behind feral-predator-proof fences.