Possums of Australia

An Introduction to Possums:

The first Australian possum to be seen and collected by a European was a Common Ringtail (Pseudocheirus peregrinus) taken by someone on Captain Cook’s voyage through the South Pacific in 1770. It was lucky this specimen, now held in the National Natuurhistorisch Museum at Leyden, Netherlands, was not eaten like the first kangaroo. They recorded this animal to the ‘opossum tribe’ because of the two young within its pouch and it was later linked with the Brazilian Opossum. There has been much confusion between the Australian ‘possums’ and the American ‘opossums’, which are two very different and only distant related marsupial groups. If Banks had decided to ask the Aborigines what they called the possum, as he did with the kangaroo, we might have called the Australian possum by a very different name (‘too lahs’, ‘bobucks’, or another indigenous name). Finally, after many years of debate, the ‘O’ was dropped with Australia...