When I sat down at the keyboard, I had no intention of saying anything about wombats, much less anything about the unique qualities of wombats’ butts. But life is a journey and sometimes you have to get off the main highway and stop and smell the…well, never mind.

Wombats are small, furry, burrowing marsupials native to Australia. They are cute, resembling a chubby rat without the long tail. One of their claims to fame is that when threatened, rather than face their predator with their sharp teeth and claws, they retreat to their burrows and block the burrow entrance with their hind ends, which happen to be made of dense connective tissue and tough cartilage. Not only do the wombats buns of steel block predators from entering its burrow, but it also serves as a weapon by allowing the wombat to crush the skulls of such predators against the roof of the burrow.

And that amazing butt-plugging, predator-crushing talent is not even the most remarkable thing about wombats. Wombats are also the only known animal that poops in cubes. Wombat scat comes out in hard, compact, six-sided cubes looking for all the world like large brown dice without the numbers.

For years wildlife biologists had theories about why wombats produced cubular poop. Some argued the cubes allowed wombats to neatly stack their scat to mark their territory. Others wondered if wombats might not have square anuses. Despite those and other theories, until recently there was scant scientific research on the intricacies of wombats and their mysterious cubular scat.

That changed in 2018 with some ground-breaking work by Patricia Yang, a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who specialized in bodily fluids. Yang was intrigued with wombat poop and decided to really delve into the subject. First, she had to obtain some wombat carcasses in order to study their intestines. It turns out wombat intestines are hard to come by.

After months of searching, Yang finally located and had two road-killed wombat carcasses shipped to her in Georgia from Australia. Yang discovered that the intestines of wombats were different than, say, the intestines of a pig, in that they were shaped more irregularly and were able to stretch and compress food as it was passing through the wombat’s gut, both squeezing out all the moisture and shaping the residual matter into a dense cube.

Yang believes this better understanding of the wombat’s unique fecal talents may have broader scientific implications, including applications for the manufacturing of things in cubes. As is often the case when I come across scientific articles like this one, I have more questions after reading the article than I did before reading it, back when I didn’t know squat about wombats.

For example, who knew that Georgia Tech offered an undergraduate major in “bodily fluids”? If you want to give yourself nightmares, try imagining what the storage cabinet in the Bodily Fluids Lab at Georgia Tech looks like. How do you suppose the Fed Ex box containing the wombat carcasses was labeled?

And how hard could it have been to rule out the theory that wombats had square anuses as an explanation for their cubular poop? A cursory and respectful glance at the south end of a northbound wombat would seem to have put that theory to rest.

It’s also nice to know that large butts may be a desirable genetic adaptation. Think about the wombat’s miraculous butt next time someone asks you if a particular item of clothing makes that person’s butt look big. Perhaps say something like, “Of course not – in fact, it makes your butt look like the utilitarian and protective butt of a cute and fuzzy wombat defending its turf.”

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.