Intriguingly, the largest population of camels in the wild, numbering over 200,000 individuals, is found neither in Arabia nor in Mongolia, the traditional homelands of wild camels, but instead in the Australian desert. Camels were imported into Australia from the 1840s until the early 1900s, principally for transportation purposes in Australia’s very hot, arid deserts, but as technology advanced, the camels were not needed so much. Consequently, many were released or escaped into the desert, and have thrived and bred there ever since.