Bandicoots... Yaaay!

Lately, I've been working hard to prepare two of my series for audiobook narration—Bridgers and Diffusion. Savage, one of my favorite novels, is done and published. It's a fun listen (Audible, Amazon, or Apple Books).

Samuel, the main character of Savage, encounters some very unusual bandicoots. No, not like Crash Bandicoot, the video game character, but these bandicoots are strange in a Stan-C-Smith-science-fiction kind of way.

Bandicoots are, of course, real animals. Some of them look kind of like rats, but they could hardly be more different. This photo is a long-nosed bandicoot.

Rats are rodents, which are placental mammals (more closely related to humans than to bandicoots). Bandicoots are marsupials (more closely related to kangaroos than to rats). Marsupials are unique among mammals in that their young develop mostly outside of the female's body instead of in a uterus inside the female's body. They are born VERY small, then they crawl to a pouch on the mother's abdomen, where they attach to a nipple and grow by feeding on mother's milk. Eventually, they get so big they can no longer stay in the pouch.

Bandicoots hop like rabbits when they run. They also have a high-pitched, bird-like call they use to locate each other.

Baby bandicoots are born after a very short gestation period—only 11 days (one of the shortest pregnancies of all mammals). Like with other marsupials, when they are born, they are tiny and they move out of the uterus and to the mother's pouch.

Bandicoots normally stand on all fours, and the mother's pouch is open facing the rear, to prevent dirt from entering the pouch as the mother digs for food.

And... male bandicoots have a "bifurcated" penis, with two ends. Why? Because the females have two vaginas. Actually, this is true of many marsupials... they have two vaginas, and two uteruses (uteri?). This allows marsupials to have several young (or litters of young) that are at different stages of development. For example, a kangaroo female can have a developing fetus in one uterus, a baby that is already born but is developing in her pouch, and another baby that is out of the pouch but is still young enough to be dependent. Pretty cool, huh?

Photo Credit:
- Long-nosed bandicoot - JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons