Australia is famous for its kangaroos, koalas, and cuddly wombats, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find a world of mammals so strange, so utterly unique, that even seasoned scientists are left scratching their heads.
Now, thanks to a groundbreaking new online database, you can get up close and personal with these weird and wonderful creatures—without ever leaving your lounge room.
Let’s start with the southern marsupial mole, a creature so odd that its skeleton looks, in the words of Associate Professor Vera Weisbecker, ‘like a god rammed it into a mountainside on its day of creation’.
This isn’t just poetic license—the marsupial mole’s skull is so distorted and its claws so perfectly adapted for digging that it’s almost as if evolution itself had a bit of a laugh.
These moles don’t just burrow; they swim through sand, their bodies streamlined for a life spent almost entirely underground.
But the marsupial mole is just the tip of the iceberg. The new Ozboneviz database, led by Weisbecker and her team at Flinders University, features 3D scans of 189 Australian mammals, with a whopping 1,600 bones and skeletons available for anyone to explore.
Whether you’re a researcher, a teacher, a student, an artist, or just a curious soul, you can now spin, zoom, and marvel at the mandibles, femurs, and skulls of everything from ringtail possums to brush-tailed phascogales.
Why does this matter? For starters, Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions—a sobering fact that underscores just how precious and precarious our native wildlife really is.
‘We are losing far more than a few fluffy rat-like critters,’ Weisbecker warns. ‘Our mammals have evolved in isolation for nearly 40 million years—there is simply nothing like them anywhere else. They’re all so weird and diverse.’
And weird they are! Take the lesser bilby, now extinct, whose full skeleton has been digitised for the first time.
Or the thylacine, the legendary Tasmanian tiger, whose skull sits alongside those of foxes and dingos, allowing you to compare their shapes and sizes in stunning detail.
It’s a virtual time machine, letting us peer into Australia’s evolutionary past and see just how different our mammals are from those found anywhere else on Earth.
The Ozboneviz project is more than just a digital museum. It’s a powerful tool for researchers, who can use the high-resolution scans to identify bones found in the field, and for educators, who can bring Australia’s unique biodiversity into classrooms around the world.
It’s also a treasure trove for artists and nature lovers, offering a new way to appreciate the beauty and strangeness of our native fauna.
But perhaps most importantly, Ozboneviz is a reminder of what’s at stake. As Weisbecker points out, many scientists from the northern hemisphere still see Australia’s marsupials as ‘an alternative universe’—a testament to just how different, and how special, our wildlife really is.
By making these 3D scans freely available, the team hopes to inspire a new generation of Australians (and global citizens) to care about, and fight for, the creatures that call this continent home.
So, what can you do? Dive into the Ozboneviz database and take a virtual tour of Australia’s strangest mammals. Share your favourite finds with friends and family.
And most importantly, join the conversation: which Australian animal do you think is the weirdest? Have you ever encountered one of these creatures in the wild? We’d love to hear your stories and see your comments below!
Let’s celebrate the weird, the wonderful, and the downright bizarre—because in Australia, that’s just how we roll.
Also read: Lost Australian animal stuns locals after turning up 14,000km away
