Wombats are the only animals known to produce cube-shaped droppings.
A wombat can leave dozens of small, almost perfectly cubic droppings in a night, often stacked on rocks and logs. The cubes do not roll away, which helps mark territory.
Why is this true?
Researchers found that the wombat intestine has stiffer and more elastic sections that squeeze the contents into flat faces over the long, slow digestion. The work won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.
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More about animals
Animals are the easiest place to find facts that sound invented. Three hearts, blue blood, cube-shaped droppings, a punch fast enough to boil water for an instant — every one of these is ordinary biology to the animal doing it. The collection here leans on well-documented behaviour and anatomy rather than folklore, so each entry comes with a short explanation of why the trick actually works and a source you can read next.