Wombat
Wombats are stocky, short legged marsupials found only in Australia, built for a life spent largely underground. This page covers the common or bare nosed wombat, the most widespread of the three living species, which lives across southeastern Australia and Tasmania. With powerful legs and broad claws, it digs burrows that can reach about 20 to 30 meters in length, a shelter from heat, cold and predators. It grazes at night on grasses, sedges and roots, and its slow digestion, which can take a week or two, squeezes every bit of energy and water from poor food. The pouch opens toward the rear, so no soil gets in while the mother digs. Wombats are famous for their cube shaped droppings, the only mammals known to make them, and for a tough rump backed by a plate of cartilage that works as a shield at the burrow entrance. They look slow but can run at over 40 km/h for short distances. The IUCN lists the common wombat as Least Concern, with an estimated 1 to 2 million mature animals, while the northern hairy nosed wombat is one of the rarest mammals in the world.
What is a wombat? The three wombat species
A wombat is a burrowing, plant eating marsupial from Australia, which means the females carry and feed their young in a pouch, like kangaroos. The name comes from Dharug, the Aboriginal language of the Sydney area, and it entered English soon after Europeans arrived. Three species are alive today. The common wombat, also called the bare nosed wombat, Vombatus ursinus, is the one most people picture: coarse brown or gray fur, small round ears and a bare, grainy nose. It lives in southeastern Australia and Tasmania and is the subject of this page. The southern hairy nosed wombat lives in the dry plains of South Australia and the edge of Western Australia, and the northern hairy nosed wombat survives only in a few protected sites in Queensland. Hairy nosed wombats have softer, silkier fur, longer pointed ears and short fur on the nose. Wombats belong to the same group of marsupials as the koala, their closest living relative, and both have a pouch that opens toward the back. Tasmania has its own subspecies of common wombat, and a third subspecies lives only on Flinders Island in Bass Strait, with a population moved to Maria Island in the 1960s or 1970s.
How big is a wombat? Size, weight and speed
Common wombats are about the size of a medium dog, but much lower and heavier for their length. On the mainland, adults measure around 84 to 115 cm from nose to rump, with an average close to one meter, and weigh 22 to 39 kg, about 26 kg on average. They have almost no tail. Tasmanian wombats tend to be a little smaller, and the Flinders Island form is smaller still. Males and females look alike, although males often have a broader head. The body is barrel shaped and set on short, thick legs. The front feet carry five strong, flat claws that work like shovels, and the skull is wide and heavy to anchor big jaw muscles. Thick skin covers the back, and the rump hides a hard plate made of cartilage and bone. The fur is coarse and varies from sandy brown to gray and almost black, while joeys look grayer and softer. Despite their bulky look, wombats are surprisingly quick. The Australian Museum notes that they can run at over 40 km/h over short distances, fast enough to outrun most people, and they keep their speed in bursts of a few seconds while dashing for a burrow. They are also strong, agile climbers over logs and rocks and can squeeze through narrow gaps under fences.
Why are wombat droppings cube shaped?
Wombats are the only animals known to produce cube shaped droppings, and the mystery puzzled people for a long time. Some guessed that the cubes were shaped as they left the body, but studies of the wombat gut showed that the shape forms much earlier, inside the intestine. In 2018, researchers led by Patricia Yang and David Hu at Georgia Tech studied the intestines of wombats killed on roads. They found that the walls of the last part of the intestine are not equally stretchy all the way around. Some bands are stiff and others are soft, and as the gut contracts, the stiffer zones press harder and carve flat sides and fairly sharp corners into the drying waste. A later computer model confirmed this stiff and soft pattern and showed that the droppings get drier as they move along, which helps them keep their shape. Each cube is about 2 cm across, and a wombat can leave 80 to 100 of them in a night. Wombats use them as signposts. They leave piles on top of rocks, logs and mounds along their paths and near burrows, where the smell tells other wombats who lives there. Flat sides mean the droppings are less likely to roll off, which makes them better markers than round pellets.
Where do wombats live? From the Great Dividing Range to Tasmania
The common wombat lives in southeastern Australia, from the far southeast of Queensland through New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria to a small area in the southeast of South Australia, as well as across Tasmania and on Flinders Island. It is most common along the Great Dividing Range and the coast, in eucalyptus forest, heath, woodland, coastal scrub and the edges of farmland, and it reaches alpine grasslands up to about 2,200 meters in the Snowy Mountains, where wombats often walk through the snow in winter. What these places share is soil that is deep and firm enough to dig, usually near creeks and gullies, and good grass nearby. Tasmania is one of the best places in the world to see wombats. They graze in the open at Cradle Mountain, Narawntapu National Park and on Maria Island, where they have become used to people and can sometimes be seen in daylight. On the mainland, Wilsons Promontory in Victoria and Kangaroo Valley in New South Wales are well known spots. The hairy nosed wombats live farther west and north: the southern species on the Nullarbor Plain and parts of South Australia, and the northern species only in central Queensland. No wombat lives naturally outside Australia.
Wombat burrows and other special adaptations
Few animals are as well built for digging as the wombat. It loosens soil with its front claws, pushes it back with its hind feet and shoves the pile out of the tunnel like a small bulldozer. Common wombat burrows are usually more than 2 meters below the surface, and while many are short, the longest can reach about 20 to 30 meters, with several entrances, side tunnels and sleeping chambers. A single wombat may use a dozen or more burrows across its home range, and burrows can be shared or passed on over many years. Underground the temperature stays mild and steady, cool in summer and warmer than the air on frosty nights, which saves the wombat water and energy. The pouch opens toward the back, so soil does not fall on the joey while the mother digs. The rump is the wombat's shield. Under thick skin it has a hard plate of cartilage and bone, and when a predator follows it into a tunnel, the wombat turns its back, blocks the passage and is said to be able to push the intruder against the roof with great force. The teeth are another adaptation: like those of rodents, they have no roots and keep growing all its life, so they never wear out on tough, gritty grasses.
What do wombats eat?
Wombats are grazers. Common wombats feed mostly on native grasses, such as tussock grasses and wallaby grass, together with sedges, rushes, herbs, roots and fungi, and in hard times they also dig up roots or chew the inner bark of shrubs. They nip the grass very close to the ground with their sharp front teeth and split upper lip, which lets them graze short pastures that other animals cannot use. A wombat may spend many hours feeding each night and walk several kilometers in the process. Its digestion is famously slow. Food can take one to two weeks to pass through the gut, one of the longest times known in any mammal, and that slow trip allows the wombat to pull as much energy, protein and water as possible from tough, poor food. Wombats also have a low metabolism, using much less energy than a kangaroo of the same size, so they need less food and very little water. In many places they get almost all the moisture they need from plants and dew. Near farms they sometimes graze on pastures, and in the past this led to conflicts with farmers, but most of their diet comes from native plants that cattle and sheep do not eat.
How wombats live: nights, sounds and joeys
Common wombats are mostly nocturnal. They spend the day asleep in a burrow and come out after dark to feed, although in cold weather and on quiet islands like Maria Island they often graze in the afternoon sun. They live alone, but their home ranges overlap, and they keep in touch through scent, droppings and scratch marks rather than meeting face to face. When they do meet, they can be noisy. Wombats hiss, growl and give a harsh, rasping cough when annoyed, and two wombats in a dispute may chase, bite at each other's rumps and screech. Joeys make a soft, whining call to their mother. Breeding can happen at any time of year. After a short pregnancy of about a month, the female gives birth to a single tiny joey, the size of a jelly bean, which crawls into the pouch and attaches to a teat. It stays inside for about six to ten months, then spends more time outside, following its mother and returning to the pouch to drink or hide, and it is fully weaned at around 15 months. Young wombats leave to find their own range at about one and a half to two years. In the wild many wombats live up to about 15 years, and in captivity they can pass 20.
Hairy nosed wombats: the rarest wombats
The two hairy nosed wombats are close relatives of the common wombat, with softer fur, longer and more pointed ears, a broader nose covered in fine hair and a liking for drier country. The southern hairy nosed wombat, Lasiorhinus latifrons, lives in semi arid grassland and scrub on the Nullarbor Plain, in parts of South Australia such as the Murraylands and Eyre Peninsula, and just over the border in Western Australia. It is the smallest of the three species and lives in large warrens shared by several animals. Drought, mange, land clearing and competition with rabbits and livestock have led the IUCN to list it as Near Threatened. The northern hairy nosed wombat, Lasiorhinus krefftii, is one of the rarest large mammals on Earth and is listed as Critically Endangered. By the early 1980s only about 35 were left, all in Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland. A predator proof fence built in 2002, extra food and water and constant monitoring helped the population grow to around 400 animals. To avoid keeping all of them in one place, a second colony was started in 2009 at the Richard Underwood Nature Refuge near St George, and in 2024 wombats were moved to a third site in Powrunna State Forest.
The giant wombat and other extinct relatives
Today's wombats are the last members of a group that once included much bigger animals. The best known is the giant wombat, Phascolonus gigas, which lived across much of Australia during the Pleistocene. It stood about a meter tall and weighed somewhere around 100 to 250 kg according to museum estimates, several times heavier than a modern wombat. Studies of its skull and teeth suggest it grazed like living wombats, although scientists still debate how much it dug. Phascolonus shared the land with even larger relatives, the diprotodonts, such as Diprotodon optatum, a heavy, rhinoceros sized marsupial that also belongs to the wider wombat and koala family tree. Most of these giants disappeared in the late Pleistocene, roughly 50,000 to 40,000 years ago, at about the time people arrived in Australia and as the climate became drier, and the role of each cause is still discussed. Their fossils have been found in caves, lake beds and river sediments from Queensland to South Australia, and some of the best collections are shown in the Queensland Museum and the South Australian Museum. These ancient giants are a reminder that the small, stocky wombat of today is the survivor of a once much larger and more varied family.
Are wombats endangered? Mange, roads and protection
The common wombat is not endangered. The IUCN assessed it again in October 2024 and, in a listing published in 2025, kept it as Least Concern, with an estimated 1 to 2 million mature animals and a stable population, about a fifth to a third of them inside protected areas. That does not mean it is free of problems. Cars kill large numbers of wombats on country roads every year, especially at night. Sarcoptic mange, caused by a mite thought to have arrived with European settlers and their animals, makes wombats lose their fur, crack their skin and slowly starve, and it can wipe out local populations. Tasmania's Narawntapu National Park lost most of its wombats to mange in the 2010s, and programs in several states now treat burrows with medicine. Bushfires, land clearing and dogs add more pressure. The picture is far worse for the other species. The southern hairy nosed wombat is listed as Near Threatened, and the northern hairy nosed wombat is Critically Endangered, with a few hundred animals in three protected sites in Queensland. The Flinders Island subspecies of the common wombat is also listed as Vulnerable in Australia. All wombats are protected native animals, and only licensed carers may raise orphaned joeys to return them to the wild.
