Animals of Oceania

Australia and New Guinea separated from the other southern landmasses early and stayed separate, and their mammals took a different path. Marsupials filled the roles that placental mammals took elsewhere — grazers, browsers, burrowers, gliders and, until recently, a marsupial apex predator. Alongside them, the platypus and the echidnas are the only surviving monotremes, mammals that lay eggs, a lineage found nowhere else on Earth.

The map of Australia is a map of aridity. A vast arid and semi-arid interior covers most of the continent, ringed by a narrower band of woodland and forest along the coasts and by tropical savanna across the north. New Guinea is the opposite: a mountainous, wet island whose highlands hold tree-kangaroos, echidnas and a long list of rodents and bats, many of them confined to a single valley. The smaller islands of the Pacific carry almost no native land mammals at all, and what they do have is mostly bats, which is why Oceania's species counts stay low even though its endemism is extreme.

Australia has the worst mammal extinction record of any country in the modern era, and the cause is unusually well documented: introduced foxes and cats, changed fire regimes, and the loss of the small-to-medium ground-dwelling mammals that had no defence against either. The species that survive best today are those on offshore islands or inside predator-proof fences — a pattern the distribution maps show plainly.

Species mapped: 81
Countries covered: 7
Threatened species: 24
Data updated: August 9, 2026

Conservation status of these species

Countries covered

The 7 countries whose name appears in at least one Red List range description in this dataset, with the number of species recorded in each. A wide-ranging animal is counted in every country it crosses.

The families found here

Dasyuridae 9
Muridae 8
Vespertilionidae 7
Cervidae 6
Potoroidae 5
Balaenopteridae 4
Macropodidae 4
Delphinidae 3
Molossidae 3
Otariidae 3
Vombatidae 3
Bovidae 2

Species to know

48 of the 81 species recorded here, threatened ones first. Select any of them to open it on the globe.

Other continents

Counts recomputed from the mapped dataset; countries are derived from the range descriptions of each assessment. Species data from the IUCN Red List, last refreshed on August 9, 2026.