Scientists have been interested by how kangaroos advanced to hop with such effectivity. To research that, researchers turned to a type of evolutionary second-cousin of the kangaroo, the musky rat-kangaroo.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Hopping has advanced a number of occasions within the animal kingdom. Assume grasshoppers, frogs, rabbits. However perhaps the bounciest of the group could be kangaroos, which may hop and hop and hop with superb effectivity, proper?
PETER BISHOP: As they go sooner, they do not really use any further power. They basically use the identical quantity of power no matter how briskly they’re hopping.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Peter Bishop of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology says scientists know a bit about how that works.
BISHOP: Kangaroos have very lengthy hind limbs, very lengthy legs, they usually have very, very lengthy tendons. And they also’re basically bouncing alongside on a set of, like, rubber bands, virtually – very elastic. To allow them to bounce and recoil and recuperate lots of their power from step to step.
SUMMERS: However an even bigger query is how kangaroos’ superpower got here to be. To research, Bishop and his colleagues turned to a type of evolutionary second cousin of the kangaroo, a rat-looking creature referred to as the musky rat-kangaroo.
BISHOP: It is sort of stocky, small, forages about within the tropical rainforests, would not look a factor like what you’ll sometimes affiliate with a kangaroo. It is not massive, lanky, bouncing about on these two very lengthy hind legs.
CHANG: No. In actual fact, it isn’t identified to hop on its hind legs in any respect, which is why they needed to review it – to see if this pudgy, brown critter would possibly maintain clues about how protokangaroos moved.
SUMMERS: So to review the tiny ‘roo, the researchers arrange cameras within the rainforests of northern Australia and filmed the animals sort of scurrying round. Then they used software program to investigate the movies, deconstructing the musky rat-kangaroos’ gait body by body, they usually discovered…
BISHOP: Even at their quickest pace, they all the time stayed on 4 legs. They bounded alongside.
CHANG: And the way in which they bounded alongside was revealing.
BISHOP: As they transfer, their hind limbs all the time transfer collectively as a pair. And that’s telling us that that could possibly be a precursor to the bipedal kangaroos as a result of additionally they transfer their hind limbs in pairs.
CHANG: The findings seem within the journal Australian Mammalogy. Bishop says the work provides scientists insights into how kangaroo hopping may need advanced and maybe new concepts as properly for robots or prosthetic units primarily based on jumpers just like the kangaroo.
BISHOP: They have been determining basically the identical sorts of issues that engineers and roboticists are attempting to work out.
SUMMERS: However the animals already have an enormous soar – get it? – on human technologists by tens of hundreds of thousands of years.
(SOUNDBITE OF NATHANIEL DREW X TOM FOX’S “MEU JEITO”)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Go to our web site terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for additional data.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This textual content is probably not in its last type and could also be up to date or revised sooner or later. Accuracy and availability could differ. The authoritative report of NPR’s programming is the audio report.
