A video gone viral of a lady scrubbing a wombat.

Adorable. I imagine wombats are a little light on the smarts, though. Apparently in the early days of mammalian evolution mammals got by on cutes alone. The world was full of birds, a few big and deadly, sure, but most not, and the genuinely dangerous dinosaurs were all long gone, and the surviving reptiles never much of a threat. So you could be cute and roly poly and it worked in some odd evolutionary way. It was a step up on the monotremes, at least, who were just weird. Spikey, duck billed, egg laying, poison toed. Pretty ladies do not hold spiny echidnas in their laps and scrub them, at least not twice. Nowadays, though, anywhere outside of Australia you have to be a lean mean killing machine ball of kitten fluffiness to be considered cute. Placental mammals play rough. Slaughtering birds by the billions and melting people’s hearts. Imagine that, how humans were preyed on by leopards for our entire existence–there are million year old hominid fossil bones that million year old leopards had scraped the meat from–and now we think that little tiny scale models of leopards are the cutest things ever. Disturbing. Doubtless the distant end to humanity can be found in hardwired psychology like that. Wombats, though, are from a dumber time, when human genes were still trapped in annoying little prosimian genomes, while off in placenta-free Australia marsupial wombats were all dumb as little dorks, lolling in the sun and never getting jokes, but laughing anyway.

One wet wombat.