Koala bears
With their fuzzy bodies, roundish heads and fluffy ears, koalas may look a lot like a bear but in fact they are not bears at all. They are part of a family of mammals called marsupials, which are native to Australasia, the Wallacea region of Indonesia and the Americas. This family of animals also includes kangaroos, wombats and bandicoots.
Marsupials are best known for carrying their young in pouches. Unlike humans and most other animals, their babies are not fully developed when born and aren’t ready to go out into the world. Instead, they are nurtured inside a fold of skin and muscle where they feed from their mothers’ teats. It takes just 35 days for a baby koala to develop inside the womb before being born and climbing, without help, into the pouch.
Another main difference between koalas and bears is the shape of their brains. Koalas don’t have a corpus callosum, the bit that connects the two halves of mammals’ brains.