Joel Kontinen
They’re cute and soft – though they might probably bite your finger if they mistrusted you – but did you know that koalas are living fossils that have been around for at least “25 million years”?
That’s what the fossil record suggests, anyhow.
Like other Australian marsupials, they are intelligently designed to cope in a harsh climate.
We might think that koalas are lazy but clinging to tree branches on a hot day is a clever strategy to keep cool that cannot be easily explained away by a Darwinian story.
Australia has a wide variety of living fossils, from the Wollemi Pine and cycads to the Kangaroo Tail (Xanthorrhoea australis), which, by the way, is a tree.
The duck-billed platypus, the spiky anteater and dragonflies likewise pose problems for evolution.
And we shouldn’t forget sharks and crocodiles that have remained virtually unchanged for “200–400 million years”.
In New Zealand, the tuatara has defied change for “200 million years” and further north, in Asia, the red panda has done likewise for “tens of millions of years”.
Source:
Australian Koala Foundation. nd. History of Koalas.
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