Stop Everything - It Turns Out Wombats Also Have Biofluorescent Fur - ScienceAlert

First we discovered platypus would look great at a rave, now wombats, bilbies and other marsupials can join the blacklight party - with scientists unexpectedly finding they all glow wonderfully fluorescent greens, blues and pinks beneath UV light.

Over the last few years scientists have found biofluorescence is more common across mammals than we realised - with flying squirrels that glow a bubblegum pink, prompting researchers to see how far back this trait exists in our mammalian heritage by checking out monotremes like the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) - the most ancient still living mammalian lineage.

Naturally, once the platypus's glow was revealed, other researchers like Western Australian Museum curator of Mammalogy, Kenny Travouillon and biologist Linette Umbrello, started shining UV down on different specimens in the museum's collections.

"There are chemical compounds in lots of different animal body parts that do seem to fluoresce, so it's not surprising to find there may be other chemical compounds in other things like fur that fluoresce," Frankham said.

After platypus was shown to glow under UV light, couldn't resist trying bilbies...

Eastern barred bandicoots glow pink under UV but sugar gliders do not.

Many of the biofluorescent mammals identified so far are either nocturnal or crepuscular (most active at dawn and dusk), but biofluorescence requires a light source for the glow to then re-emit from and there's less of UV light around at night. .

He's planning to test more mammals with different lights and see if there really is a pattern with nocturnal mammals