Parma Wallaby

About the Parma Wallaby

The parma wallaby (Notamacropus parma) is a small marsupial macropod mammal native to forests and densely-vegetated areas of northeastern New South Wales, Australia, close to the border with Queensland. An introduced population exists on New Zealand's Kawau Island. About the size of a stout cat, it lives mainly under thick plant cover, and is only active at night when it emerges to feed on grasses and small plants. It is the smallest of the wallabies (short, kangaroo-like marsupial mammals of the genus Notamacropus) and carries its young in a pouch, as with other marsupials. Shy and elusive, it was believed extinct until its rediscovery in the 1960s.

Parma wallabies are threatened by habitat loss, and, in addition to native predators (such as birds of prey, monitor lizards, and snakes), they are easily preyed upon by dingoes and non-native feral cats and red foxes. The parma wallaby was first described by British naturalist John Gould in about 1840. Its epithet parma (Waterhouse 1845) comes after a word from a New South Wales Aboriginal language, but the exact source word and language have not been identified.

In 2019, a reassessment of macropod taxonomy determined that... Wikipedia →