Australia’s Second-Smallest Rock-Wallaby Reappears in a Region Where It Had Not Been Seen for 50 Years

The endangered nabarlek is not easy to find and difficult to distinguish from similar species. But a research team made new detections of the animals that offer “good news for their long-term survival”

Carlyn Kranking | Associate Web Editor, Science

September 10, 2026 2:00 p.m.

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The second-smallest rock-wallaby in the world is about as long as a loaf of bread.

On its strong hind legs, it hops around rocky outcrops, cliffs and crevices, using the rough pads on its feet to grip sheer rock. By day, the species stays hidden from predators, and by night, it comes out to feed.

This secretive and rarely seen creature, called the nabarlek, is endangered, put at risk by shifting fire regimes and introduced predators. But in a small spot of hope for the marsupial, Australian conservationists and the Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporation recently captured the species on camera at two sites in Western Australia where it had not been scientifically recorded before. Both lie in a remote region where the nabarlek had not been documented for 50 years.

“This is very exciting and great news for the species,” Larissa Potter, a senior field ecologist with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, says in a statement. “It’s also reassuring, as it indicates that this threatened wallaby is persisting … in places we didn’t previously know about.”

Finding a nabarlek is difficult. And once scientists have detected a wallaby that fits the animal’s description, verifying that it’s the target species is no easy task, either.

The nabarlek looks nearly identical to the monjon (another small rock-wallaby that shares its range), and its genes very closely resemble those of the short-eared rock-wallaby. So, to confirm their discovery, the team took multiple steps, using both camera trap imagery and genetic analysis to rule out the presence of these other creatures.

First, they set out five cameras that operated at night, triggered by the motion of nearby animals. They looked through the resulting photos to determine that the short-eared rock-wallaby is not found at the sites, assuring them that its similar-looking DNA would not be confused with that of the nabarlek. The short-eared rock-wallaby can easily be dismissed with images, because it doesn’t look the same as the nabarlek. Then, to make sure that the photographed wallabies were indeed nabarlek rather than the roughly identical monjon, researchers collected scat samples from the site to analyze their DNA.

These results came back with positive news for conservation: The elusive nabarlek had been found.

On paper, the nabarlek’s range includes parts of northern and northwestern Australia. “However, within this broad distribution, the number of locations where the species has been recorded is small,” Potter tells Smithsonian magazine. “And they have not been recorded from some areas for a long time.”

For instance, in the Victoria River District, a pastoral area in the Northern Territory of Australia, the nabarlek hasn’t been seen for 170 years—so researchers assume that there, it is locally extinct.

The new wallaby detections were in the Kimberley, a vast expanse of plateau, rivers and canyons on the northern coast of Western Australia. There, the nabarlek had previously been sighted in only a handful of locations. The region boasts more than 2,500 islands, and the nabarlek is known to occur on just five, says Potter; on the Kimberley’s mainland, the wallaby has been documented in fewer than ten spots. “Most of the mainland records are old museum specimens from the 1950s and 1970s,” she adds.

That’s why the recent sightings came as a pleasant surprise to ecologists. They’re located on the Indigenous lands of the Dambeemangaddee people, and they represent the first records of the nabarlek in mainland Dambeemangaddee Country in more than five decades.

“These records show that the species is more widely distributed than previously thought, which is good news for their long-term survival and conservation outcome,” Potter says.

Ecologists don’t know much about nabarlek populations in the Kimberley. Some studies were done on the species in the Northern Territory decades ago, Potter adds, but “we don’t know how transferable some of this research is to the Kimberley and these populations.”

To better conserve the newly found animals, the scientists want to understand their population size, breeding biology, diet, distribution, genetics and threats. With more funding and research, they hope to uncover whether the population is stable.

“We want to know more about them,” Inga Pedersen, Dambeemangaddee Traditional Owner, says in the statement. “Is it a healthy population? We want to compare them to the ones on the islands and make sure this animal isn’t disappearing.”

Carlyn Kranking is Smithsonian magazine's associate web editor for science.