This golden mole is an exceptionally rare sight in Australia's outback
While it might just look like an adorable ball of fur, a sighting of this animal only occurs a few times in a decade.
It is a marsupial mole, a.k.a. a karrkaratul, a rarely-seen burrowing mammal found lurking in the central deserts of Australia. This one was spotted by rangers in the Kiwirrkurra Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) in Western Australia, while they were documenting stories about bush foods in the area.
"We were driving along a bush track on our way home when this little golden creature ran across the road in front of us," Kate Crossing, a coordinator at Kiwirrkurra IPA, wrote in a post on the Tjamu Tjamu Aboriginal Corporation - Kiwirrkurra Facebook page on Saturday.
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One of the passengers in the car yelled out "karrkaratul" when it was spotted, before the driver stopped the vehicle to take a peek at the rare creature. Some of the rangers said they had never seen one, while one person said they had witnessed one years ago.
"We all crowded round as Yalti held this beautiful creature carefully in her hands, its powerful front feet trying to dig to safety," Crossing wrote.
Mark Eldridge, Principal Research Scientist in the mammalogy section at the Australian Museum, told Mashable Australia that such a sight is so uncommon that very little is actually known about the marsupial mole.
"They're just so rarely encountered that we don't know how rare or common they are. They live most of their lives underground, and rarely come to the surface," he said.
Marsupial moles are spotted on the surface usually after rain, Eldridge said, running along the surface before burrowing back down into the desert. So blink, and you'll likely miss it. "There are so few people in the areas where it occurs ... Certainly sightings of them only occur a couple of times a decade," he said.
Found in the sandy deserts of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, people often spot the marsupial mole's tracks due to their spade-like forelimbs, used primarily for digging.
They also have no eyes and no external ears; but still has functional hearing from inside its body, with presumably a good sense of smell. It also has no known relatives, despite resembling other animals.
"The remarkable thing is it looks like some of the completely unrelated moles from places like South Africa, but ended up looking similar because of their lifestyles," Eldridge said.
As for Crossing and the Kiwirrkurra rangers, they let the creature go -- where it dug its way back underground shortly after and disappeared. See you in a few years, little guy.
[h/t ABC News]
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