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Something about Kangaroo and Koala with Noa

How did the animals get to the ark?
Skeptics paint a picture of Noah going to countries remote from the Middle East to gather animals such as kangaroos and koalas from Australia, and kiwis from New Zealand. However, the Bible states that the animals came to Noah; he did not have to round them up (Genesis 6:20). God apparently caused the animals to come to Noah. The Bible does not state how this was done.
We also do not know what the geography of the world was like before the flood. If there was only one continent at that time (see later in this chapter), then questions of getting animals from remote regions to the ark are not relevant.

Did the kangaroo hop all the way to Australia?
How did animals make the long journey from the Ararat region? Even though there have been isolated reports of individual animals making startling journeys of hundreds of miles, such abilities are not even necessary. Early settlers released a very small number of rabbits in Australia. Wild rabbits are now found at the very opposite corner (in fact, every corner) of this vast continent. Does that mean that an individual rabbit had to be capable of crossing the whole of Australia? Of course not. Creation speakers are sometimes asked mockingly, ‘Did the kangaroo hop all the way to Australia?’ We see by the rabbit example that this is a somewhat foolish question.
Populations of animals may have had centuries to migrate, relatively slowly, over many generations. Incidentally, the opposite question (also common), as to whether the two kangaroos hopped all the way from Australia to the ark, is also easily answered. The continents we now have, with their load of Flood-deposited sedimentary rock, are not the same as whatever continent or continents there may have been in the pre-Flood world.
We also lack information as to how animals were distributed before the Flood. Kangaroos (as is true for any other creature) may not have been on any isolated landmass. Genesis 1:9 suggests that there may have been only one landmass. (‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’). For all we know, kangaroos might have been feeding within a stone's throw of Noah while he was building the Ark.

The koala and other specialized types
Some problems are more difficult to solve. For instance, there are creatures that require special conditions or a very specialized diet, such as the giant panda of China or Australia's koala. We don't know, of course, that bamboo shoots or blue gum leaves4 were not then flourishing all along their eventual respective migratory paths. In fact, this may have influenced the direction they took.
But, in any case, there is another possibility. A need for unique or special conditions to survive may be a result of specialization, a downhill change in some populations. That is, it may result from a loss in genetic information, from thinning out of the gene pool or by degenerative mutation. A good example is the many modern breeds of dog, selected by man (although natural conditions can do likewise), which are much less hardy in the wild than their ‘mongrel’ ancestors. For example, the St Bernard carries a mutational defect, an overactive thyroid, which means it needs to live in a cold environment to avoid overheating.
This suggests that the ancestors of such creatures, when they came off the Ark, were not as specialized. Thus they were more hardy than their descendants, who carry only a portion of that original gene pool of information.5 In other words, the koala's ancestor may have been able to survive on a much greater range of vegetation. Such an explanation has been made possible only with modern biological insights. Perhaps as knowledge increases some of the remaining difficulties will become less so.
Such changes do not require a long time for animals under migratory pressure. The first small population that formed would tend to break up rapidly into daughter populations, going in different directions, each carrying only a portion of the gene pool of the original pair that came off the ark.
Sometimes all of a population will eventually become extinct; sometimes all but one specialized type. Where all the sub-types survive and proliferate, we find some of the tremendous diversity seen among some groups of creatures which are apparently derived from one created kind. This explains why some very obviously related species are found far apart from each other.
The sloth, a very slow-moving creature, may seem to require much more time than Scripture allows to make the journey from Ararat to its present home. Perhaps its present condition is also explicable by a similar evolutionary process. However, to account for today's animal distribution, evolutionists themselves have had to propose that certain primates have traveled across hundreds of miles of open ocean on huge rafts of matted vegetation torn off in storms.6 Indeed, iguanas have recently been documented traveling hundreds of kilometres in this manner between islands in the Caribbean.7
The Bible suggests a pattern of post-Flood dispersal of animals and humans that accounts for fossil distribution of apes and humans, for example. In post-Flood deposits in Africa, ape fossils are found below human fossils. Evolutionists claim that this arose because humans evolved from the apes, but there is another explanation. Animals, including apes, would have begun spreading out over the earth straight after the flood, whereas the Bible indicates that people refused to do this (Genesis 9:1, 11:1-9). Human dispersal did not start until Babel, some hundreds of years after the Flood. Such a delay would have meant that some ape fossils would be found consistently below human fossils, since people would have arrived in Africa after the apes.8
We may never know the exact answer to every one of such questions, but certainly one can see that the problems are far less formidable than they may at first appear.9 Coupled with all the biblical, geological, and anthropological evidence for Noah's Flood, one is justified in regarding the Genesis account of the animals dispersing from a central point as perfectly reasonable.10 Not only that, but the biblical model provides an excellent framework for the scientific study of these questions.
References and notes
S.A. Elias, S.K. Short, C.H. Nelson, and H.H. Birks, Life and Times of the Bering Land Bridge, Nature 382:60–63, 1996.
Note that the region around the north of Australia to Southeast asia is a tectonically active part of the world.
Anon., Platypus Tooth Bites Hard into Long-held Beliefs, 14(1):13, 1992, based on an article in New Scientist, 24 August 1991. A platypus is a monotreme (an egg-laying mammal).
Actually, the koala can eat other types of gum leaves. Australia has around 500 species of eucalypt (gum) trees. Koalas eat the leaves of about 20 species, with the blue gum a favorite. Recent work has shown that the koala's insistence on eucalypt is actually an addiction to certain chemicals in the leaf which it first eats in the mother's milk. Bottle-raised koalas can survive on a non-eucalypt diet (see CEN Tech. J. 8(2):126). Also, the giant panda, which normally only eats bamboo shoots, has been known to eat small animals occasionally.
See Chapter 18: How did all the different ‘races’ arise? for an example of the way in which a very light-skinned ‘race’ deriving from a mid-brown one is missing some of the information in the parent population.
Anon., Hitchhiking Lemurs, Creation 15(4):11, 1993, commenting on J. Tattersall, Madagascar's Lemurs, Scientific American 268(1):90–97, 1993.
Anon., Surfing Lizards Wipe Out Objections, Creation 21(2):8, 1999..
Dr Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer, paleoanthropologist, on the video, The Image of God, Keziah Videos.
In recent literature about some of the problems of animal distribution, even within an evolutionary framework, there has been an occasional suggestion that early man may have been a much better boat-builder and navigator than previously thought. Various types of animals may thus have accompanied people on boats across the sea. This should be kept in mind as a possibility in some instances. Animals brought in this way to a new continent may have prospered, even though the accompanying people did not stay, or perished.
For further reading: J. Whitcomb and H. Morris, The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian and Reformed Publ. Co., Phillipsburg, NJ, 1961. J. Woodmorappe, Causes for the Biogeographic Distribution of Land Vertebrates After the Flood, Proc. Second ICC, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 361–367, 1990.

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