Meat eating Roo

While kangaroos are known to munch grass, with the addition of fruit and flowers, Sam Murray captured this curious footage of a western grey kangaroo tucking into a penguin on the beach at Cape Le Grande national park, located east of Esperance, Western Australia.

"We were walking down to the beach in the late evening before sunset, and we noticed a group of five or six kangaroos gathered on the beach. We started towards them and all the others were quick to hop away, but not this smaller one," Sam says. "He was really quite focused on what he was doing. Even when we got to within a meter and a half of him, he wouldn't stop eating." Professor Graeme Coulson, a zoologist at the University of Melbourne, explains that "All living macropods appear to be gentle herbivores.

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"They [generally] lack the equipment to capture and kill other animals, or the digestive system to handle a meaty diet." While penguins aren't a typical kangaroo snack, Graeme says that "Australia once had carnivorous macropods. The largest of these was Propleopus oscillans, which stood up to 2 m tall and had teeth that were well adapted to eating meat. This 'killer kangaroo' went extinct tens of thousands of years ago."

Graeme also recognizes that known herbivores are not all strict vegetarians. "White-tailed deer in the USA have been reported stealing trout from a fishing camp and removing nestlings from nests hidden in prairie grassland. Captive macropods are known to eat a wide range of foods, including chicken and lamb chops. This western grey kangaroo was simply taking advantage of an easy meal," Graeme says.