18 March 2020

Koala fingerprints resemble human fingerprints

“If you passed a chimpanzee print to a fingerprint office and said it came from the scene of a crime,” Haylock said, “they would not know it was not human.”..

As with the chimpanzees, koalas have fingerprints super similar to our own. The loops, the whorls, the fact that the patterns are completely unique to each individual koala ...

Maciej Henneberg, forensic scientist and biological anthropologist at the University of Adelaide, Australia, has stated that these iconic creatures’ prints could also easily be mistaken for our own: “It appears that no one has bothered to study them in detail… although it is extremely unlikely that koala prints would be found at the scene of a crime, police should at least be aware of the possibility.”
Via Ripley's Believe It or Not.

1 comment:

  1. There must be something about that basic pattern that's evolutionarily useful or it wouldn't have evolved in very different groups of animals.

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