Why the Opossum is Amazing

The opossum often gets maligned as being nothing but common vermin that resembles a large rat. While the image of the opossum doesn’t help its cause, it is a quite fascinating animal. Here are some amazing facts about this creature that might change you from an opossum hater to an opossum fan.

Discovery

First off, it helps to know how the opossum was discovered. While the native people in the Americas knew of the animal, it wasn’t until Vincente Yanez Pinzon, who incidentally was the commander of Christopher Columbus’s ship the Nina, came upon an opossum with its young after landing on the coast of Brazil in the late 1400s. He took the animal back to Spain and presented it to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

We then have to fast forward over a hundred years to get to the first description of the North American opossum. It was written in English by Captain John Smith of the Jamestown colony. He named the animal “opossum” and got it from the Native American word “apasum,” which meant “white animal.”

Opossum or possum?

The different spellings of the word for the opossum relate to the way these mammals have been grouped. When Captain James Cook explored Australia in 1768 on the ship Endeavour, he had onboard a naturalist named Sir Joseph Banks. Banks gave the name opossum to the…