Most people would associate primates to being closest to humans.. but did you know koalas have fingerprints that are almost identical to humans? Not even careful analysis under a microscope can easily distinguish the loopy, whirling ridges on koalas’ fingerprints from our own. While koalas are evolutionarily distant from humans, their fingerprints are an excellent example of convergent evolution. According to the The University of Adelaide in Australia, “Koalas … feed by climbing vertically onto the smaller branches of eucalyptus trees, reaching out, grasping handfuls of leaves and bringing them to the mouth.” “Therefore the origin of dermatoglyphes [fingerprints] is best explained as the biomechanical adaptation to grasping, which produces multidirectional mechanical influences on the skin. These forces must be precisely felt for fine control of movement and static pressures and hence require orderly organization of the skin surface.” You can learn more about this interesting marsupial at the Australian Koala Foundation: https://www.savethekoala.com/.
Photo: A koala print and a human print. Guess who is who?