Animal · Australia, New Zealand
Common brushtail possum
Trichosurus vulpecula — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common brushtail possum is a cat-sized Australian marsupial with a bushy tail that can grip branches like a fifth hand. It sleeps all day in a tree hollow and comes out after dark, often onto the roofs of houses.
Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common brushtail possum live?
Home: Australian woodland, and house roofs in New Zealand.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Australia, New Zealand.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 32-58 cm long, plus a 24-40 cm bushy tail. It weighs about 2.5 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
In Australia this possum belongs where it is. It eats eucalyptus leaves, flowers, fruit and the occasional insect or egg, and it carries its young in a pouch like every other marsupial. In 1850s New Zealand, settlers released brushtail possums to start a fur trade, and there the animal found forests with no predators and trees that had never learned to defend themselves. By the 1980s there were an estimated 60 to 70 million possums in New Zealand, stripping whole canopies bare and eating birds' eggs. Years of trapping and poisoning have brought the number down to roughly 30 million. The same animal is protected in one country and fought as a pest in the other.
Find it on the globe
Common brushtail possum is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Is a possum the same as an opossum?
Why are possums a problem in New Zealand?
They were brought there in the 1850s for their fur and found forests with no predators. Millions of them strip trees bare and raid birds' nests, which native species there never had to cope with.
What do brushtail possums eat?
Mostly leaves, and eucalyptus leaves above all, plus flowers, buds, fruit and seeds. Now and then it takes an insect, an egg or a small animal, which makes it an omnivore rather than a pure leaf-eater.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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