Evolving a dig-in-the-dark mole lifestyle comes with radical anatomical changes, making it hard even to guess the animal’s closest relatives. That’s why the true identity of Australia’s most enigmatic and cryptic mammal, the marsupial mole, has been called into question for decades.
The two fit-in-your-hand Notoryctes species are elusive. “I’ve never handled, or even seen, a marsupial mole in my life, and I almost certainly never will,” says Stephen Frankenberg, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Sightings are rare. Even in Australia, he says, plenty of people have probably never even heard of them.
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