Naked Wombats

Naked wombats.  Without any pre-written content, it simply struck me as an interesting title for a post, but then, when I went looking for pictures, I actually found a mostly naked wombat baby, which has now become my animal of choice.  JUST LOOK AT IT!!!

Yes, this is a naked wombat!

Did you know that wombats are marsupials like kangaroos, koalas, opossums, possums and the Tasmanian Devil - who carry their young in pouches until they are able to fend for themselves?  Imagine if you will, Bugs Bunny's Tasmanian Devil having a fit inside someone's pouch?  What sort of elasticity would that pouch have to have?

Having seen the naked baby wombat, I went looking for other pics and saw that the full grown wombat is THIS big!!!

Much bigger than a naked baby wombat

This makes me want it even more!!! I can just imagine curling up next to it in bed.  I'm sure that I can make David see that this is a good thing - at least in the winter - the wombat would be warm and would cut our electric mattress heating pad costs by half, I'm dead certain.  Plus (but wait there's MORE!) I could put my hands in its pouch and they would then be very warm too!  Way better than putting them in David's armpits when I'm cold!  Really, this is a win-win for David.

And then I discovered that WAY, WAY back before it went extinct 46,000 years ago, there was a GIANT WOMBAT!!!   Like the size of a freaking RHINOCEROS kind of giant.  It was called a Diprotodon and it was part of a group of unusual species dubbed "Australian Megafauna."  How cool is that?  It's like a freaking Prog Rock band! 

Ladies and Gentlemen!  We bring you now....
AUSTRALIAN MEGAFAUNA!!

Giant Wombat!!  Also with a pouch!!!

Scale to human

Other Australian Megafauna include the Zygomaturus - another giant marsupial similar to the modern pygmy hippopatamus - but still a marsupial which means it has a POUCH!!!

Zygomaturus

Then there is the Palorshestes - yet ANOTHER marsupial with a POUCH!!!

Looks like a giant Tapir, but is NOT because it too has a POUCH!!

And LOOK!!!  This is a Procoptodon!  Which was a GIANT KANGAROO - with its own POUCH!!!

I wanted this one to look really big, but in actuality it was only about 10 feet tall

David just looked at me like I was fucking nuts when I showed him what I've done this morning in between answering emails.  Maybe what this all comes down to is that I want my very own pouch.   You know, like to keep my wallet and hair clips in and possibly my emergency Gravol and maybe some hand lotion.  He just asked me "Do you want your own pouch?"  See, we're totally simpatico!  Plus, now with the pictorial evidence for other pouch options, I'm pretty sure that he'll let me have a regular-sized wombat, you know, on account of the fact that he doesn't want me to use prehistoric mammal DNA and wind up going all Jurassic Park.