The Story Behind Australia's Weird Animals 

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/MothLight . You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription.

Always a refreshing treat to see a video about Australian wildlife that isn’t rife with sensationalism.

8:39 man, tasmanian tigers were so beautiful. didn't realize footage existed

Australia is truly a weird place

Apart from the monotremes, the weirdest creatures in Australia are the birds, but for some reason they don’t seem to attract much attention. Australian birds are exceptional in many ways.

That was a pretty sick wombat. They are badly affected by endemic mange, introduced with European settlement. It kills them eventually.

I am very happy that you’re being sponsored! I have always wondered how such a large continent‘s fauna and flora remained so isolated, even though there were potential land bridges in the past

Sometimes, I wish the continents were more disconnected. A world full of Australias would give so many different animal groups a stage to diversify. Imagine a continent dominated by monotremes or only rodents. I love every video. From the voiceover to the production they are brilliant. I clicked after 29 seconds:D

A 20 minute MLM episode? And it's only Tuesday??!! Truly we are blessed

Wake up new moth light media dropped

Thank you for keeping this videos music free and soft in the ears

New World marsupials (opossums) are so interesting. Once you reach central Mexico, more or less, there are more species & genera present than only the common Virginia opossum. So they blend in a lot more, I think, than here in the US, where people call them “giant rats” and stuff. 🙄Yeah, a giant rat with a pouch and 75 teeth instead of gnawing buck teeth…lol. They’re so misunderstood. I wanted one as a pet as a kid. And in a way, nearly got one! Not really. But on my seventh birthday, something told me to look out into the backyard; I watched as a female opossum, with five babies on her back, came clambering down the tree and proceeded to walk RIGHT UP to my window (on the ground floor). Keep in mind my family has had at least three cats at all times, too, which apparently were gone at that time. I was so shocked that this mama opossum would walk up, lay down and take a nap with her babies, RIGHT THERE in front of my window. She slept, but the babies were playing and staring at us. Best birthday gift ever. Hahaha.

Aw sweet! MothLightMedia talks about subjects I never stopped to think about

Keep the frequency coming!! Love your take on Paleontology and the images you use to illustrate such animals 🙌🏾 Wish there was a Paleontologycon or something like that for nerds like me who find exotic animals and dinosaurs fascinating.

"Babe wake up, Moth Light Media just dropped a new vid"

I love when Monito del Monte is mentioned

Yeah rodents and bats are our only native placental mammals. Dingoes are a strange middle ground as they arrived before European colonization

Do a playlist about Australia

The evolution of squirrels

2:10 I hope that poor wombat with mange got the necessary treatment 😢

Damn fine content

They are no more weird than giraffes, rhinoceroses, polar bears, llamas, bison or elk. They’re just different, not weird.

was really happy seeing that Brilliant ad at the start, you deserve it

Always happy to see a new MLM video

I live here in Australia and studied ecology in Tasmania. If you ever visit I'd love to meet - I love your videos. I could show you some amazing places.

Such high quality documentary. Ty ❤️

Thanks for another excellent video. Always get me thinking.

Humans can certainly ditch their young pre-birth, but certain people aren't particularly happy about it

God bless he has returned

It's always a treat when I see a new Moth Light Media video in my feed.

I absolutely love the way you make your videos you're one of the best channels of this genre of video if I have the choice I watch this channel over nearly all others

Very informative. Many thanks.

Great analysis. Very interesting.

I got here as soon as I got the notification. 👍

great video as always!

Brilliant video, as always!

Mercifully within my lifetime Australia's marsupials have stopped being referred to as 'primitive' mammals

Fascinating. Thank you

Great video. Thank you! I still miss the little intro branding, though, and would welcome its return. 😊

love your vids, thanks for sharing.

My FAVORITE channel to fall asleep to. I mean this in the best way. Keep it up!

Top notch educational program! You deserve more subscribers!

Such a fully researched and wide-ranging across topics episode 🥰

My relief when the original music has come back 😭 thanks Moth.

Still one of the best science channel on RU-vid

"My national bird is the Emu, and it's a pest. Also bloody delicious."

Great video!

holy crap i have never seen that tassie tiger video in such high resolution that is crazy love your channel, i have tried a few other biology channels and none of them shine a light (hehe) to your top tier quality

A longer video!!! Yesss

It’s a good day when Moth Light drops a new video :)

Calming voiced, ancient fauna expert is back ^.^ Great topic of choice!

I truly enjoy your channel. Its incredibly helpful to my understanding that you give timelines, geographies, common ancestry. The full spectrum really solidifies these concepts. Wild about the ostrich and the emu lineages splitting before T Rex existed. That one is gonna sit with me. Just how many bird lineages actually made it through the KPG? Man, nature and life is so amazing.

Fantastic!

This is just brilliant!

That wombat with mange b-roll got me like 😢

Do a a video about both the evolution of the kagu and the hoatzin respectively

Fascinating I've heard about the Wallace line but this really explains it

Our animals are not weird. They’re UNIQUE.

Another great video. I hope your voice is okay. Thanks for the content as always.

Wonderful video. Probably the most interesting l have ever seen on marsupials!

It gets weird down under.

Great video! It reminded me to reread the way we count by the DNA separation from a common ancestor.

'like the philloso-raptor' yes. aka raptor sapien.

Loved the video! Just so you know though, at 11:16 you should Emu habitat not including a lot of Victoria (that southern bit), but Emus actually come all the way down to the outer reaches of Melbourne. The only reason they're not actually on our streets is because they're pretty skittish.

Sparassodonts are stem-marsupials.

I love this channel

Excellent!

Can you do the evolution of electric eels?

Your videos give just the right amount of depth. You and some others on RU-vid give us these great pieces on animals. Please consider doing some on plants too. It’s just as interesting, and it’s an untapped niche on RU-vid. Better still, plants are very well represented in the fossil record and archaic species represented in modern flora. It wouldn’t go unappreciated ❤️

Oh hell yeah new video!!

Could you please do a video on the evolution of parrots?

I love learning while I sleep

MOTH LIGHT MEDIA RAAAAAH

Man your content is SO GREAT!!!!! How come you don't have more subscribers!?!?! Thanks for the Great info and images!!! 🙌🙌🙌🦘🐊

I'd love to see a video on the convergent evelution kelp had with plants. I only just learned kelp aren't plants and am now obsessed with this fact

awe sweet, my favourite youtuber posted

Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't Sparassodonts proven to be a sister clade to Marsupials? They were basal metatherians but not Marsupials

Please never stop making videos

Well done for pronouncing "emu" correctly! :D

Aus wildlife focus? Say no more. I'm invested.

I think a video about the fauna of prehistoric India when it was an island subcontinent would be very interesting, it is difficult to find information about.

At quick glance, I thought the Lycopsis is wearing a yellow sweater

...I think you'll find dingos being native is still a question to be answered.

SUPER NICE Congrats on the sponsor (If that something to be proud of?)

Interesting Stuff!!! 🦘🦤🐨

Do a vídeo about sunda islands

It's nice to know that Noah didn't leave them behind.

That was awesome

I believe it was a scientist named Zinsmeister in the 80's who predicted that we should find proto-marsupials in Antartica from 40 mya, one of the great successes of evolutionary theory and biogeography.

Very nice tie-ins with previous episodes. Good work as always!

I still miss the old intro ❤

Sorry babe can't come over new. New moth light media just dropped

Your videos kick ass!

Those first dogs founded the dingo empire of today. Are they still good boys and girls?

I miss the intro!

The most fascinating aspect in the history of Marsupials (and their close Metatherian relatives) is how on earth they got to South America in the first place. Because by all accounts they weren’t there in the Cretaceous. I have an idea regarding this, but it’s a little outside of the box. We’ve known for ages about the phenomenon of “rafting,” wherein “rafts” of trees and vegetation bring land dwelling animals to new islands and continents. It’s very wildly accepted but since such events are so rare how they happen is up to more speculation. One idea thrown around is that Tropical cyclones dislodge the vegetation during the storm surge. Indeed, the one example possibly witnessed by humans, of some Iguanas colonizing the island of Anguilla, was caused by a Hurricane. But while that might account for most dispersals, it can’t account for all of them, the Canary Islands for instance do not lie in the path of any Tropical Cyclones and given their location I have difficulty believing that would’ve been different in the past, though for the Canaries the currents are favorable for such “rafting” events in general. However storm surges are not the only thing that can sweep plants and animals out to sea, Tsunamis can do that as well. That is where I think South America’s marsupials and metatherians came from. I do not know how dangerous ground zero would have been a day or two (or a week) after the disaster, but even if it was a death zone, the vicinity, and especially the island arc directly to the south of North America, would have been relatively “safe” insofar as anywhere was in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Their are other reasons why I think this. The origins of the “South American Native Ungulates” or Meridiungulata, has always been controversial. At first glance they appeared to be exactly that, ungulates. However many paleontologists were absolutely convinced that most of them, but especially the Notoungulates, were Afrotherians, indeed some still cling on to that notion despite its original problems and the recent compelling evidence against it. Everyone seemed to agree that the group was a polyphyletic waste basket taxon. However this controversy was not destined to remain solely in the realm of cladistics. For more than one group of South American Native Ungulate survived into the late Pleistocene, and they have sub fossils with DNA. Since 2015, not only have the Notoungulates and Litopterns been demonstrated by DNA and collagen testing to form a monophyletic group, but they have also been proven to be genuine ungulates, pretty much blowing up the Afrotherian hypothesis of their origin (much to the distress of various ego driven paleontologists who believed that hypothesis as is always the case for these things). With the fossil record of Litopterns stretching back to the earliest Paleocene, any new theory of their origin must account for how they got to South America. My own theory, though I am not a paleontologist, is that Laurasiatheria began diversifying well before the extinction event (just like the molecular clock says). When the asteroid struck, huge tsunamis swept across the globe, not just caused by the asteroid itself but also by the gigantic earthquakes it caused. Those tsunamis struck North America particularly hard and many animals were swept out to sea. Ironically the heat shock caused by the shower of meteors coming from the impact, often alleged to be a major killer in the extinction event, could have been less severe for anything surviving on the rafts. The rafts carried with them not just North American Marsupials and Metatherians, but also the ancestors of the South American Native Ungulates, amongst other small creatures, and maybe even some non-avian dinosaurs doomed to die through starvation and/or oxygen deprivation. Given the shear amount of sea-born debris created in the disaster, it was probably inevitable that some of it would end up on nearby South America, despite the gaping burning hole in the middle of the ocean between them. After the dust had settled in the beginning of the Paleocene the newly rafted animals underwent explosive diversification in South America, as one does in the aftermath of such a large extinction event. But the ancestors of the South American Native ungulates, despite being supposedly “superior” placental mammals, did not dominate all the niches. Instead they convergently evolved to resemble the other ungulates of North America and Eurasia, in much the same manner as the Ratites evolved flightlessness on every landmass to which they originally flew.

Excellent video! Please do one about the domestication of chicken throughout different cultures.

"five meter long amphibians" TAKE ME BACK TO THAT TIME NOW

Based on the brains of Marsupials and what is generally known about their intelligence I would say most living marsupials are comparatively more primitive to placental mammals, specifically dogs, pigs, cetaceans, elephants and primates. On average marsupials have less wrinkles in their brains which generally correlates with more complex cognitive ability, obviously they're quite distinct from multi-tuberculates, but compared to placental mammals, if we're going by cognitive ability I'd venture to say they are more "primitive" in this regard. Now it's possible the Tasmanian Tiger was an exception but there's not a lot we know about their cognition since they've all gone extinct.

I think you are the only non-australian that pronounces emu correctly