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

With the size of a small muscular dog, the Tasmanian Devil is the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world, only found in the Australian island state of Tasmania. It has black fur and is renowned for its disturbing call, ferocious temperament and the fact that it releases an offensive odor when stressed.

The Tasmanian Devil, also referred to simply as “the devil” is now facing extinction and was listed as an endangered species by the Tasmanian state government. The cause is a disfiguring facial cancer that kills an animal in just a few months, that decimated the island state’s wild devil population by as much as 60 percent.

The transmittable parasitic cancer causes tumors to form in and around the mouth, interfering with feeding so that an animal may starve to death. It originates from a single contagious cell that has spread through biting during fights for food or mates. However, they may be hope because David Llewellyn, Tasmanian Primary Industries Minister, said that some devils from Western Tasmania had developed antibodies to this facial tumor.

“While it is still very early days, discoveries such as this provide hope that the disease may be managed in the longer term and that devils with genetic diversity will survive it,” he said.

Photo by blather