Zoo Miami Welcomes First-Ever Wombat Birth, the Only One in the U.S. This Year

Zoo Miami has pulled off a marsupial milestone. The zoo announced that a southern hairy-nosed wombat joey, the first successful birth of the species in the zoo’s history, and the only successful southern hairy-nosed wombat birth in the United States this year, has begun emerging from her mother’s pouch.

Because wombat newborns are roughly the size of a jellybean and develop hidden inside the pouch, the birth itself went unseen. Zoo staff estimate the female joey was born around Jan. 19, following a pregnancy of only about 30 days. She then spent months growing in her mother’s rear-facing pouch, an arrangement that keeps dirt out while mom digs, before offering keepers their first glimpses this summer.

The proud parents are Gordon, an 8-and-a-half-year-old male who arrived from the Los Angeles Zoo, and Adelaid, a 9-and-a-half-year-old female from Illinois’ Brookfield Zoo. The pairing was part of a coordinated effort to breed a species that is rarely reproduced successfully in American zoos.

Built Like a Tank, Poops Like a Dice Factory

Southern hairy-nosed wombats are the smallest of Australia’s three wombat species, typically weighing 45 to 65 pounds, with oversized ears and broad, fuzzy snouts. They are engineering marvels: powerful claws let them excavate sprawling burrow networks called warrens, and their rumps are reinforced with tough cartilage, a built-in shield they use to block burrow entrances against predators.

They are also the animal kingdom’s reigning oddballs in one memorable respect: wombats produce cube-shaped droppings, a quirk scientists believe helps the pellets stay put when marking territory.

Zoo officials say the joey is healthy and increasingly bold about poking her head into the world, giving visitors to the zoo’s Australia-themed area a shot at spotting one of the rarest baby animals on display anywhere in the country. In a summer when South Florida’s animal headlines usually involve pythons and iguanas, a homegrown wombat, born in Miami, no less, makes for a welcome change of species.