People aren’t the only thing we lose in fires that we care about.

Kangaroo corpses can be seen scattered by the roadsides. Wombats emerge from their underground burrows to find blackened earth and no food. Wildlife rescue officials say millions of animals likely perished in the inferno. The kangaroos were overwhelmed by flames and smoke when attempting to flee. Kangaroos that survived suffer from burned feet.. After escaping they likely circled back to their homes thus singeing their feet.

Wombats that hid managed to survive the blazes, but if they are not rescued, they face a slow and certain death because their food supply gone.

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I know Yomamma jokes. How about a Yopapa joke? Turns out that Australian researchers think that kangaroos might be related to humans, being genetically similar and all.

In fact, the researchers guess – fact and guess are opposites, but that doesn’t matter – that the kangaroos may have first evolved in China then hopped across the Americas to Australia and Antarctica.

Scientists said they had for the first time mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials and found much of it was similar to the genome for humans, the government-backed Center of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics said.

“There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order.”

Let me guess one of the differences. The kangaroos have a hopping gene and humans have a walking gene. “Humans and kangaroos last shared an ancestor at least 150 million years ago, the researchers found, while mice and humans diverged from one another only 70 million years ago.”

So, why do kangaroo mamas hate it when it rains outside? Because, then the kids have to play inside.

Image courtesy of aaardvaark