Australian animal facts for kids: 5 animals from Australia and its neighbours

Australia has been an island continent for tens of millions of years, and its animals evolved apart from everywhere else. Most native mammals are marsupials that carry their young in a pouch: kangaroos, the largest of them, hop on elastic tendons so efficiently that cruising costs little more energy than walking, and koalas sleep up to 20 hours a day to digest toxic eucalyptus leaves. Stranger still is the platypus, a mammal that lays eggs, has a duck-like bill that senses electric fields, and carries a venomous spur on the male's hind leg. Across the water in Indonesia, the Komodo dragon — the world's largest lizard — lives on a handful of islands and hunts deer with a venomous bite. The saola of Vietnam and Laos, discovered only in 1992, is one of the rarest large mammals on Earth. Koalas are listed as Vulnerable and the Komodo dragon as Endangered as habitat shrinks and sea levels rise.