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In this episode writer Katherine Rundell brings us the wombat - a creature adored by Victorian poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who described them as “a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!” and kept two as pets. The wombat also has surprising physical prowess: it can sprint at 40 kilometres per hour and has a unique defensive tactic, using its reinforced rump to crush predators against the walls of its burrow. To early settlers in Australia wombats were seen as pests and were hunted in huge numbers, with bounties introduced in the 1920s. Habitat destruction followed, and today, the common wombat is no longer common. The northern hairy-nosed wombat is now one of the rarest land mammals on Earth, with only around 400 individuals surviving. Written and presented by Katherine Rundell Produced for ��ѿ��ý Audio in Bristol by Natalie Donovan