Humans and Koalas Have Remarkably Similar Fingerprints

Even more famous than kangaroos due to their lovely appearance, koala bears are among Australia's most recognizable residents. Despite how adorable they are, koalas are actually two-foot-tall gray bears who live in trees, so you'd never mistake one for a person. In terms of marsupials, wombats, opossums, and, yes, kangaroos are the closest relatives to koalas. Their tiny marsupial fingers, however, contain fingerprints that are so similar to human fingerprints that even specialists may struggle to tell them apart at first glance in an instance of very unusual convergent evolution.

You would need to travel back around 100 million years, well before the T. Rex even walked the globe, to find a common ancestor between humans and koalas. But they have fingerprints that resemble human fingerprints and may perhaps function similarly. Koalas only consume specific types of eucalyptus leaves, thus it seems to reason that their tactile sense, as well as their fingerprints, play a significant role in selecting the best leaves. It appears that because they require a perfect grasp and sensitivity comparable to humans, their fingerprints have evolved similarly to ours.