When European explorers first saw these strange hopping animals they asked a native Australian what they were called.He replied "kangaroo" meaning "I don't understand" your question.The explorers thought this was the animal's name, and that's how the kangaroo got its name. A Kangaroo is a marsupial mammal. It is a macropod which means "big foot".A male kangaroo is called a boomer, a female kangaroo is called a flyer and a baby kangaroo is called a joey.
There are over 40 different species of Kangaroo. The smaller ones are usually called Wallabies.The largest is the Red Kangaroo. It is the largest marsupial in the world. A kangaroo carries its baby in its pouch. The baby is born really tiny and crawls into its mother's pouch. The baby lives in its mother's pouch till its quite large. Even when its quite large it still drinks milk from a teat in its mother's pouch. It sometimes jumps into its mother's pouch head first when it gets frightened.
All kangaroos have a chambered stomach similar to cattle and sheep. They regurgitate the vegetation they have eaten, chew it as cud, and then swallow it again for final digestion. The Red kangaroo eats during the night on a wide variety of grasses and low herbaceous plants, though sometimes this grazing period starts late evening and ends early morning When water is available it will drink but, if it obtains sufficient green food, it does not need to do so.
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