Red Kangaroos

The red kangaroo (Macropus rufus) is the largest surviving marsupial anywhere in the world. The Red Kangaroo occupies the arid and semi-arid centre of the country. The highest population densities of the Red Kangaroo occur in the rangelands of western New South Wales. Red kangaroos are commonly mistaken as the most abundant species of kangaroo, but eastern greys actually have a larger population.[18] A large male can be 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall and weigh 90 kg (200 lb).[19]
The eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus) is less well-known than the red (outside Australia), but the most often seen, as its range covers the fertile eastern part of the country. The range of the eastern grey kangaroo extends from the top of the Cape York Peninsula
Kangaroos and other macropods share a common ancestor with Phalangeridae from the mid-Miocene.[20] This ancestor was likely arboreal and lived in the canopies of the extensive forests that covered most of Australia at that time, when the climate was much wetter, and fed on leaves and stems.[21] From the late Miocene though the Pliocene and into the Pleistocene the climate got drier which led to a decline of forests and expansion of grasslands. At this time there was a radiation of macropodids characterised by enlarged body size and adaptation to the low quality grass diet with the development of foregut fermentation.[21] The most numerous early macropods, the Balbaridae and Bulungmayinae, became extinct in the late Miocene around 5–10 mya.[22] There is dispute over the relationships of the two groups to modern kangaroos and rat kangaroos. Some argue that the balbarines were the ancestors of rat kangaroos and the bulungmayines were the ancestors of kangaroos.[23] while others hold the contrary
Early explorers described them as creatures that had heads like deer (without antlers), stood upright like men, and hopped like frogs. Combined with the two-headed appearance of a mother kangaroo, this led many back home to dismiss them as travellers' tales for quite some time.[citation needed] The first kangaroo to be exhibited in the western world was an example shot by John Gore, an officer on Captain Cook's Endeavour in 1770.[26][27] The animal was shot and its skin and skull transported back to England whereupon it was stuffed (by taxidermists who had never seen the animal before) and displayed to the general public as a curiosity. The first glimpse of a kangaroo for many 18th-century Britons was a painting by George