This book is largely about kangaroos. Their past and development, what we know of it, and also their present, as the world around them continues to shift. It's often detailed through Flannery's stories about his own travels around Australia. Sometimes for work, but in the early chapters, it's he and a friend using the Christmas break between semesters to try and circumnavigate Australia on their motorcycles. Mechanical breakdown and subsequent arson cuts the trip short.
The stories include a lot of descriptions of the colorful characters Flannery meets along the way, something that continues once he's visiting different locales as part of fossil studies. This includes a cook for a sheep-shearing crew who is very happy to meet Flannery at first, but becomes increasingly unfriendly because he heard "paleontologist" as "opossum", and thought Flannery was there to get rid of the opossums breeding and squabbling in the ceiling of the bunkhouse. It results in a casual tone which makes the book at times feel like almost a travelogue or reminiscence.
Which is not to say the book skimps on details about the animals. I did learn a lot about kangaroos. How spotty the fossil record is, for one thing. There's a (or perhaps was, the book was published in 2004) gap between roughly 50 to 20 million years ago where they have basically nothing, which makes it hard to figure out the radiation and evolution of characteristics. Plus other smaller gaps closer to the present, during which certain group seem to vanish entirely, while others explode in frequency. Also how many species there, once you include wallabies, tree-kangaroos, rat-kangaroos, padamelons, which I guess I wasn't thinking of as "kangaroos", so much as other types of animals altogether.
As you'd guess, there's a lot of peculiar, specialized biology in kangaroos. In some species, the female can get pregnant while still nursing another joey. Their body takes advantage of the forces generated by hopping to make respiration easier, by having the gut essentially push against the lungs to expel air. There are trade-offs. A roo's foot can't really rotate left to right, due to the features that reinforce it against the impact on the ground.
In the travels of youth portions of the book, Flannery frequently describes encounters with Indigenous Australians, who he had apparently never seen prior to his motorcycle journey. He'll describe the circumstances of their lives in the brief glimpses he gets. Poverty or how wishing a "Merry Christmas" can result in an explosion of anger from an elderly man who had been entirely genial up to then. It feels out of place initially, Flannery deciding to throw his guilt about how the Indigenous Australians had been done wrong.
But he brings it around in the latter stages when he discusses the species that are under dire threat from introduced predators, habitat loss, or climate change. He points to how the Indigenous Australians have been an integral part of the how the kangaroos have evolved or declined for many thousands (at least 40,000) years, and how barring them from their traditional practices, such as burning, have impacted the animals as well as the people. That there is a lot about these animals that white Australians, including himself, know very little about, and may never know if the species is truly extinct, because no one bothered to ask the people who'd been hunting and interacting with them for millennia.
'The Lani were absolutely right, for the kangaroo is host to the worms, which it feeds chewed leaves, while the creature itself feeds upon the worms and their by-products. Thus, in a very real sense, some kangaroos eat worms even though they swallow leaves or grass.'
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