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a post i made about quolls is getting reblogged and lots of people seem to be confused about what the hell they are, so let me clear up a little about australia’s native mammals

australia is home to a bunch of “true” mammals, the sort you find everywhere else, like native bats and rats and mice (some of which are pretty cool and some of which are terribly cute and some of which are the bane of botanic gardens)

then there’s the egg-laying weirdo monotremes, the platypus and the echidna

and then there’s marsupials, and there’s four orders of those

• diprotodonts are the herbivores that people are most familiar with, koalas and kangaroos and wallabies and possums and wombats

• the bandicoots and bilbies have their own little strange but cute group sponsored by chocolate companies

• marsupial moles are very odd creatures that no-one really knows a lot about, they’re eyeless earless golden-furred torpedoes that swim through desert sand and occasionally someone finds one above ground??

• and best of all (totally not biased), there’s dasyurids, the marsupial carnivores

dasyurids can be large (thylacines) and they can be absolutely tiny (planigales), but the common factors they share are that they’re all very cute, they all seem to think they’re 80ft tall and indestructible, and they’re mostly endangered because the indestructible thing isn’t a great idea when most of them are exactly the right size to be eaten by the 20 million feral cats roaming the australian outback

quolls are roughly cat-sized dasyurids and there’s always some chatter about letting people keep them as pets in the hopes of bolstering their declining numbers while replacing cats with our own local homebrand knock-off, but it never really goes anywhere, which is a terrible shame and means that the only time australians really see them is when they come in through the window and knock all your shit over during the night

tl;dr: quolls are australian native marsupial cats from a family of weird marsupial killers, the thylacine had a lot of odd cousins you probably never knew about, we’ve been trying to put them on leashes for at least 60 years without success but by crikey we’ll get it one of these days, they’re not rodents, what the hell is going on with marsupial moles