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The Phalangeridae are a family of mostly nocturnal marsupials native to Australia, New Guinea, and Eastern Indonesia, including the cuscuses, brushtail possums, and their close relatives. Considered a type of possum, most species are arboreal, and they inhabit a wide range of forest habitats from alpine woodland to eucalypt forest and tropical ...
Quit playing possum—there's no need to hide from these absolutely adorable possum pics! The post 25 Possum Pictures That Will Convince You They’re Actually Cute appeared first on Reader's Digest.
When an opossum is "playing possum", the animal's lips are drawn back, the teeth are bared, saliva foams around the mouth, the eyes close or half-close, and a foul-smelling fluid is secreted from the anal glands. The stiff, curled form can be prodded, turned over, and even carried away without reaction.
In mammals, the Virginia opossum (commonly known simply as possums) is perhaps the best known example of defensive thanatosis. "Playing possum" is an idiomatic phrase which means "pretending to be dead". [13] It comes from a characteristic of the Virginia opossum, which is famous for reacting with a death-like posture when threatened.
Pygmy possums have large eyes, long ears, and curling, prehensile tails they use to climb and hols onto tree branches. In times of plenty, the base of their tails can be quite round and fat.
The feathertail glider (Acrobates pygmaeus), also known as the pygmy gliding possum, pygmy glider, pygmy phalanger, flying phalanger and flying mouse, [3] is a species of marsupial native to eastern Australia. It is the world's smallest gliding mammal and is named for its long feather-shaped tail.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the opossum was the subject of numerous songs, including "Carve dat Possum", a minstrel song written in 1875 by Sam Lucas. [ 66 ] Although it is widely distributed in the United States, the Virginia opossum's appearance in folklore and popularity as a food item has tied it closely to the American Southeast .
The common opossum (Didelphis marsupialis), also called the southern or black-eared opossum [2] or gambá, and sometimes called a possum, is a marsupial species living from the northeast of Mexico to Bolivia (reaching the coast of the South Pacific Ocean to the central coast of Peru), including Trinidad and Tobago and the Windwards in the Caribbean, [2] where it is called manicou. [3]