Rejoice, For We Have Finally Discovered Why Wombat Poo Is Shaped Like A Cube

It’s a great Australian mystery: why do wombats produce poo in the shape of a cube? Well, we now know the answer.

See, wombats produce up to 100 cubes of shit every night, and they use the little piles to mark their territory. And all 80-100 of these little turds are, remarkably, cuboid. As the BBC put it yesterday, “despite having round anuses like other mammals, wombats do not produce round pellets, tubular coils or messy piles”.

In fact, wombats are the only known animal with faeces of this particular geometric shape, and it turns out it’s because they’ve got particularly, ah, stretchy intestines?

This is how the scientists who looked into the issue put it: “In the final 8 percent of the intestine, feces changed from a liquid-like state into a solid state composed of separated cubes of length 2 cm. This shape change was due to the azimuthally [that means horizontal] varying elastic properties of the intestinal wall”.

“By emptying the intestine and inflating it with a long balloon, we found that the local strain varies from 20 percent at the cube’s corners to 75 percent at its edges. Thus, the intestine stretches preferentially at the walls to facilitate cube formation.”

Basically, wombat intestines stretch in a way that creates cubic poop. That’s it. That’s the story.

Anyway, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that the answer to this mystery comes just over a decade after this extraordinary, historic documentary video asked some of the first serious questions about cubic poo in wombats. Personally, I’ve been crying with laughter at my desk watching it.

Take a moment to watch it for yourself, and especially appreciate creator Robyn Lawrence’s attempts to recreate the wombat colon with a bit of old hose and some jelly.