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It is often simply referred to as an opossum, and in North America it is commonly referred to as a possum [3] (/ ˈ p ɒ s əm /; sometimes rendered as ' possum in written form to indicate the dropped "o").
The Virginia opossum is the original animal named "opossum", a word which comes from Algonquian wapathemwa, meaning "white animal". Colloquially, the Virginia opossum is frequently just called a "possum". [8] The term is applied more generally to any of the other marsupials of the families Didelphidae and Caenolestidae.
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]
The common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula, from the Greek for "furry tailed" and the Latin for "little fox", previously in the genus Phalangista [4]) is a nocturnal, semiarboreal marsupial of the family Phalangeridae, native to Australia and invasive in New Zealand, and the second-largest of the possums.
Common ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus peregrinus), also common in Australian urban areas, absent from New Zealand Phalangeridae (possums and cuscuses), a family of marsupials native to Australia and New Guinea containing most of the species referred to as "possums" in Australia
The name came from T. S. Eliot’s 1939 collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which contained nothing but poems about kitties. ... It was a misspelling of the Latin phrase procol ...
Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana). Didelphimorphia is an order of marsupial mammals.Members of this order are called didelphimorphs, or opossums.They are primarily found in South America, though some are found in Central America and Mexico and one, the Virginia opossum, ranges into the United States and Canada.
The term "opossum" is used to refer to American species (though "possum" is a common abbreviation), while similar Australian species are properly called "possums". Isolated petrosals of Djarthia murgonensis , Australia's oldest marsupial fossils [ 71 ] Dentition of the herbivorous eastern grey kangaroo, as illustrated in Knight's Sketches in ...