Quick
Without looking anything up, just off the top of your head, give me a couple of charicteristics of a koala. Just what comes to mind immediately. The basics.
(I’ll edit this to explain why the heck I’m asking in a little bit).

The Anticipated Edit With Information:
I came across a program online that was a 20 questions game someone wrote almost 20 years go. It learns based on peoples answers, and thus it has actually become uncannily smart with regards to figuring out what you're thinking about. It managed to guess everything I was thinking until I got to thinking about a koala.
If I recall, once we got past the very first question, "Animal, vegetable, mineral or other?", it asked me "Is it a mammal?" Of course, I answered "No", as koalas are not mammals, they're marsupials.

After getting through a bunch of increasingly unrelated questions, the computer gave up and asked me what I was thinking about. I told it koala and it let me know why it hadn't gotten it right. Apparently humanity as a population had taught it that koalas were mammals. I always thought it was a well-known fact that they weren't -- hell, there are more than a few marsupials in Australia; that's the place to be for marsupials. But evidently the human race (or, at least, the computer using population over the last two decades) feels that koalas are mammals. Now, no one said "marsupial" in their comments, here, although no one actually said "mammal" either, so I'd like to believe that you all merely figured it was a given and chose not to mention it. What say you all to this apparent "cute + fuzzy = mammal" phenomenon?


Edit: okay. I guess I suck. I remember being taught in highschool that marsupials were different than mammals, and that's what stuck in my head. But as it turns out, I'm just wrong. This is why I'm in microbiology. Give me Escherichia vs. Shigella any day. Large organisms? Not so much, apparently.