How Did Noah’s Kangaroos Get to Australia?

(4 Minute Read. 13Jul2022)

Boxing Kangaroos

What do you first think of when you hear the word Australia?

Maybe it’s the kangaroo, a quintessential icon of the country. It adorns Australian postage, currency, and even its international airline.

Today kangaroos are native only to Australia, nowhere else. But did you know that kangaroos once lived in the Middle East?

Noah took a male and female of the kangaroo kind on the Ark to safeguard the kind from extinction by the Great Flood. Kangaroos have paws and not cloven hooves, and they do not chew cud. Thus they are not a clean kind of animal requiring Noah to board seven pairs (Genesis 7:2). When Noah disembarked from the Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey, the kangaroo pair left too and began life anew in the Middle East before migrating to Australia.

Along with the kangaroos and Noah’s family, all the other animals left the Ark. At God’s instruction, they were to be fruitful and multiply. (Genesis 8:15-19)

As Noah inspected the animals, he noticed a pair of snakes who had laid no eggs. When questioned why they were not obeying God’s command to multiply, they replied, “We can’t multiply; we’re adders.”

Being quick of thought, Noah and his sons collected some logs and made a log table upon which he placed the adders. Immediately the snakes produced eggs, because even adders can multiply using a log table.
[This is a math joke. Logarithm functions (logs) change multiplication into addition.]

Kangaroos After Noah’s Flood

Kangaroos once comprised over 100 species throughout Australia and New Guinea. Today 67 kangaroo species range in size from tiny rat-size ones to large hundred-pound kangaroos. The extinct giant kangaroo Procoptodon stood ten feet tall.

Today red kangaroo males stand six feet tall and weigh up to 200 pounds. They can hop at 40 mph, covering 30 feet in a single bound. They can jump six feet high, and they are superb swimmers.

Hopping is very efficient for kangaroos as they store 70% of each bounce’s energy in their leg tendons compared with 20% stored by humans with each step. Using energy stored in their bent legs at the end of each hop, kangaroos spring into the next hop. With each hop, their internal organs bounce and help push air out of their lungs, thereby conserving respiratory energy.

Kangaroo females are almost always pregnant. A kangaroo doe usually has three offspring in process — an embryo in the womb, a joey in the pouch, and an older little roo alongside.

A joey is born after a gestation period of about a month and depending on the kangaroo species ranges from about the size of a rice grain to a jellybean. Blind and hairless, the newborn joey crawls unaided from the birth canal to the pouch in about 10 minutes.

Strong muscles seal the pouch opening to prevent the joey from bouncing out. It keeps the pouch waterproof when the mother swims. A joey first emerges from the pouch after three months for short visits to the outside world but returns to nurse and sleep until eight months old, when it may weigh 8 to 11 pounds.

Does produce two types of milk simultaneously: carbohydrate-rich milk for newborn joeys and fat-rich milk for older joeys from a dedicated teat. Female kangaroos can also pause their pregnancies for months at a time, and it is believed they can determine the sex of the joey.

How Did Kangaroos Get from Noah’s Ark to Australia?

This is actually a question that applies quite broadly. How did any creature get anywhere?

After Noah’s Flood, how did people and animals disperse around the world — since they all started from Mt. Ararat in Turkey where the Ark landed? How did kangaroos get to Australia? How did kiwis get to New Zealand? How did penguins get to Antarctica? How did polar bears get to the Arctic? How did Caral pyramid builders get to Peru? How did Mayans get to Central America?

Suggesting answers for kangaroos will provide possibilities for all the various migrations of animals and people. Even if we do not know the specifics for certain, it is obvious that the migrations did occur.

Some people argue that kangaroos must not have hopped all the way to Australia, because no fossils of kangaroos have been found along the route. But fossil formation cannot occur gradually; it requires sudden rapid burial before decay, just as would have occurred by Flood sediments.

Many examples of “missing” fossils exist. No lion fossils are found in Israel despite lions once living there. Hundreds of billions of passenger pigeons once lived in North America before being wiped out by hunters. Yet only a few fossils remain. Millions of buffaloes once roamed America’s western plains, but hardly any of their fossils are found there. Thus absence of fossil examples does not mean absence of living animals.

So how did kangaroos get to Australia? They probably hopped most of the 7,000 miles from Turkey southeast to Australia. According to National Geographic, kangaroos can travel for long distances at 15 mph. Assuming a slower pace of 10 mph for only 5 hours per day, they could cover 7,000 miles in under five months.

Thus it is quite reasonable for kangaroos to have traveled to Australia in several generations over a period of a few years. Since kangaroos carry their young on the go, they had an advantage in colonizing distant locations.

How did they cross to Australia? Since kangaroos are excellent swimmers, they may have island-hopped through the Pacific islands to Australia, swimming from island to island. They might have used floating log or vegetation mats ripped up by Noah’s Flood to cross the waters.

Kangaroos could have used land bridges formed during the Ice Age after the Flood when ocean levels were lower. This is how humans got to North America from Asia by crossing a land bridge at the Bering Straits.

Humans may have taken kangaroos along with other animals when they crossed by sea to Australia. This is how dogs got to Australia, and this is how animals like horses, cows, and pigs got to North America.

How did kangaroos get from Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat to Australia? They hopped, swam, and floated and probably got there within a few years.

Questions to Ponder

1. Who will you tell today of the Great Creator’s remarkable kangaroo design?
2. After Noah’s Flood, what human or creature migration is most intriguing to you?

Share your thoughts on these questions in the comments below. It could encourage or help another reader.

For Christ and His Kingdom. Soli Deo Gloria. Alere Flammam Veritatis.

This is the 17th article in a series on Noah. This Noah Series will suggest answers to many of the questions believers and skeptics have about Noah, Noah’s Ark, and Noah’s Flood.
Read the prequels:
1. Think You Know Noah?
2. Did Jesus Think Noah Was Real?
3. How Long Did It Take Noah to Build the Ark?
4. Could Noah Build the Ark in 75 Years?
5. How Big Was Noah’s Ark?
6. Were Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark?
7. Could Noah Fit All the Animals on the Ark?
8. What Was Noah’s Flood Like?
9. Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?
10. Life on Noah’s Ark
11. Were Zebras on Noah’s Ark?
12. Evidence of Noah’s Flood: Canyons
13. Evidence of Noah’s Flood: Fossils
14. Evidence of Noah’s Flood: Rock Layers
15. Evidence of Noah’s Flood: Worldwide Memories
16. Significance of Noah’s Flood

Read the sequel:
18. Replicas of Noah’s Ark

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©William T. Pelletier, Ph.D.
“contending earnestly for the faith”
“destroying speculations against the knowledge of God”
“for the defense of the gospel”
(Jude 1:3; 2 Cor 10:5; Phil 1:16)
Wednesday July 13, 2022 A.D.

Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth. Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. You shall make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit from the top; and set the door of the ark in the side of it; you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks. Behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish.
(Genesis 6:13-17)

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