Koala around and its head has doubled in size. The eyes begin to open and fine fur grows on the forehead, nape, shoulders, and arms. At 26 weeks, the fully furred animal resembles an adult, and begins to poke its head out of the pouch. As the young koala approaches six months, the mother begins to prepare it for its eucalyptus diet by predigesting the leaves, producing a faecal pap that the joey eats from her cloacum. The pap is quite different in composition from regular faeces, resembling instead the contents of the caecum, which has a high concentration of bacteria.
Koala spellings such as "coola" or "koolah"), it was changed to "oa", possibly in error. Because of the koala's supposed resemblance to a bear, it was often miscalled the koala bear, particularly by early settlers. The generic name, "Phascolarctos", is derived from the Greek words "phaskolos" "pouch" and "arktos" "bear". The specific name, "cinereus", is Latin for "ash coloured". The koala was given its generic name "Phascolarctos" in 1816 by French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, who would not give it a specific name until further review. In 1819, German zoologist Georg August Goldfuss gave it the binomial "Lipurus cinereus".