Chapter 1: Why are kangaroos the only large mammals that hop?
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of kangaroo pouches in their development?
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Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here for Dave, and we're just hopping along, talking about kangaroos and how they hop.
That's right.
Chapter 3: How did kangaroos evolve from climbing to hopping?
I want to thank our old colleague, Kristen Conger, for writing this article from How Stuff Works Back in the Day.
And creator of Unladylike, the podcast, too.
As well as Jennifer Horton wrote another article that I used. Great, too. Remember Jennifer? And then... I think the San Diego Zoo website and Nat Geo all pitched in for this one.
I thought this was a particularly well-researched short stuff, so I should have known that Jennifer Horton and Kristen Conger had something to do with it.
Yeah, so we're talking about kangaroos a little bit, mainly going to get to how and why they hop. But we should start out by talking about the fact that roos are marsupials or pouched mammals because they have a marsupium, which is a little pouch where their little joeys develop.
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Chapter 4: What adaptations help kangaroos hop efficiently?
Yeah, we talked, I think, a lot about this in the Naked Mole Rat episode, where essentially, like, the marsupial fetus does not develop as long inside the body of the mom as it does inside the pouch.
Essentially, at some point, it's what you would call born, but really, it's just crawling out of the birth canal, outside into the world for a second, and into the pouch, and then the little Joey latches onto a nipple in there, and the nipple grows... Three times in size, just like the Grinch's heart.
And so the little Joey couldn't let go of the nipple, even if he or she wanted to, until they develop a little further. It's quite ingenious. Hats off, Natural Selection. That's a great one.
Yeah, that's maybe the fact of the podcast for me. That's kind of nutty.
Oh, I'm sorry I took that.
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Chapter 5: How fast and far can kangaroos jump?
I didn't realize that it was.
What do I have to always take the fact of the show?
I like to, you know.
I mean, I know it's in my contract and not yours, but I'm willing to give every now and then.
That's very generous of you. Thank you.
All right. So Australia is obviously what people, you know, what comes to mind when you think of marsupials in general, because koalas and kangaroos. But we have done a great episode on the opossum, which live all over the place, especially north, central and South America. But we're talking about kangaroos and wallabies here because they don't have four legs like our opossum friends.
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Chapter 6: What role does the kangaroo's tail play in hopping?
They have two big old feet and two little littler arms.
Yeah, that's a great way to think about it. They don't have four legs. They have two legs and two arms. And it makes sense.
Like if you've ever seen a kangaroo or you just bring one to mind, if you're capable of using your mind's eye, they're sitting on their feet and they're standing or sitting upright and their little almost titanic arms are just kind of hanging out there, not doing much of anything.
Yeah, except boxing, probably. The kangaroo, the first sightings apparently traced back to a Dutch merchant named Francisco Pelsert, who got shipwrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629. And about 150 years later, they were pretty well known throughout Europe. And by 1791, they had brought those things over to London, England.
Chapter 7: How do kangaroos use energy efficiently while hopping?
Here's the fact of the podcast for me, Chuck. Okay. Can I take this one, too, or should I tee you up? No, double up, baby. So the name kangaroo, the word, as far as anyone is able to say, we don't know for sure, it's apparently an aboriginal word for I don't know. Isn't that awesome? I don't know.
That's pretty funny. It is. Here's the deal, though, is kangaroos are the only large mammals to hop.
Chapter 8: What are the differences between kangaroos and wallabies?
And that's basically like they're, you know, bunnies will hop a little bit. But the kangaroo moves around primarily by hopping. And I guess you wouldn't consider a bunny a large mammal anyway. Here's the deal. If you go back to 25 million years ago and look at the fossil record, they didn't hop because Australia was a rainforest at the time.
So those kangaroos were climbing around for a long, long time.
Yeah. So they actually developed what ends up helping them hop long before they actually started to hop. We call that the fourth toe. If you look at a kangaroo's foot, you can see how it's hopping. And Chuck, I think I've kind of set us up for an ad break. And we're going to come back and finally talk about how kangaroos hop. What do you think? All right, let's do it.
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Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five. She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture. And then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were... She did. They kicked her out and paid for her hotel.
And they thought, it's finally over. Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time. She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son?
Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot, waiting for him to see if he would show up. When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him. She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station. And spoilers, karma's going to show up in the best way possible.
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Okay, where I left off, Chuck, I was talking about the fourth toe, and this is the design element that allows the kangaroo to hop. Because if you look at a kangaroo's foot, the first toe, looking at the kangaroo's foot from the inside of the foot outward, The first toe is pretty puny, might not even be there. The second and third toes, they're okay.
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