Do any animals have fingerprints like humans?

Picture the scene: a detective dusts a window ledge, finds a perfect set of loops and whorls, and confidently runs them through the system. The culprit? A sleepy marsupial with a eucalyptus habit.

The short answer

Yes. Apart from humans and our close primate relatives, the standout example is the koala. Koalas have ridged fingerprints with loops and swirls that look remarkably like ours. Viewed under a microscope, they can be very difficult to distinguish from human prints.

The real story

The similarity came to wider attention in the mid-1990s thanks to Maciej Henneberg, a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist working in Adelaide, Australia. He noticed fingerprint-like ridges on koalas at a local wildlife park and took a closer look. In a 1996 interview with the British newspaper The Independent, he raised the idea that koala prints could, in theory, confuse investigators.

Before anyone panics about koala burglars, Henneberg himself acknowledged it was extremely unlikely that koala prints would ever turn up at a crime scene. Fingerprint specialists can tell them apart, and modern computer matching would almost certainly flag a different species. Still, the resemblance is uncanny.

What makes it truly surprising is the family tree. Koalas are marsupials. Their lineage and ours went separate ways more than 100 million years ago, and the koala’s close relatives, such as wombats and kangaroos, do not have fingerprints at all. So koalas did not inherit their prints from an ancestor they share with us. They evolved them independently.

Biologists call this convergent evolution: unrelated species arriving at similar solutions because they face similar problems. Koalas spend their lives gripping branches and handling eucalyptus leaves, and they are notoriously fussy about which leaves they eat. One suggestion is that fingerprint ridges help with grip, and may also help them feel the texture of leaves before eating them, in much the way our own fingertips help us sense the world.

Why people get it wrong

We are taught that fingerprints are the ultimate marker of individual human identity. They appear on passports, phones and crime shows, so it feels natural to assume they are a human-only feature. People who know a little more usually extend the club to chimps and gorillas, which makes sense because they are our close cousins.

A koala breaks that logic completely. It is not a primate, not closely related to us, and lives on the other side of the mammal family tree. The idea that evolution would reinvent the same swirls on a tree-hugging marsupial simply does not occur to most people. That is exactly what makes it one of nature’s best plot twists.

“Fingerprints like a human, diet like a fussy toddler, sleeps most of the day. Honestly, the koala’s basically one of us.”