Australia’s map looks like a dog and a cat once you know where to look

Key points

• Australia’s outline can resemble two animal heads
• Tasmania becomes the joke’s “cat food”
• The illusion is an example of pareidolia

Australia is known for kangaroos, koalas and some of the world's most unusual wildlife. But a playful map suggests two more animals have been hiding in plain sight: a dog and a cat.

Split the outline of mainland Australia roughly down the middle and the western half can be imagined as a dog's head looking left, while the eastern half resembles a cat's head looking right. Tasmania, sitting south of the mainland, completes the joke as the cat's “food”.

There is, of course, no geographical significance to the divide. The line does not represent a state border, geological boundary or recognised division of Australia.

What the map demonstrates is pareidolia, the tendency to see familiar objects or meaningful patterns in shapes where they do not actually exist. It is the same phenomenon that can make people see faces in clouds or other everyday objects. Cambridge Dictionary describes pareidolia as seeing a pattern or image of something that is not really there.

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Australia's distinctive outline makes the illusion particularly easy to play with. Geoscience Australia says the country covers about 7.69 million square kilometres, making it the world's sixth-largest country and the smallest continental landmass.

Tasmania is considerably smaller. Geoscience Australia puts the state's total land area at about 68,401 square kilometres, less than 1% of Australia's total area.

Australia is also almost as wide as it is long. The mainland stretches nearly 4,000 km from east to west, while the country extends about 3,860 km from its northernmost point to its southernmost point in Tasmania.