Marsupialia

140mya Marsupials

OPPOSSUM, SUGAR GLIDERS, MARSUPIAL MOLES, KANGAROOS, WALLABYS.
This group of live birth pouched mammals, the marsupials, shared a common ancestry with us a hundred and forty million years ago. Even though present-day marsupials are mostly found in Australia and New Guinea, they originally flourished and diversified for a period of time in South America. Evidence points to the migration of a single species of opossum-like marsupial from South America to Australia before 55 million years ago, when it was still possible to make the journey through Antarctica before Australia pulled too far away from Gondwana. Once settled in the isolated Australia, the founding marsupials quickly evolved into distinct species and, for the next 40 million years, took up the entire range of 'trades' previously occupied by dinosaurs, in the absence of any placental mammals.  The word marsupial comes from marsupium, the technical term for the abdominal pouch. It, in turn, is borrowed from Latin and ultimately from the ancient Greek mársippos, meaning "pouch".All extant marsupials are endemic to AustralasiaWallacea and the Americas. A distinctive characteristic common to most of these species is that the young are carried in a pouch. Marsupials include opossumsTasmanian devilskangarooskoalaswombatswallabiesbandicoots, and the extinct thylacine.
Despite great evolutionary distance between marsupial moles in Australia and the golden moles in Africa, they are remarkably similar in terms of phenotypes, with the exception that the marsupial moles sport a pouch as all marsupials do. There are also marsupial mice (Dasyuridae), marsupial flying squirrels (Sugar Glider) and marsupial wolf (extinct Thylacine), not to mention the equivalent of antelopes and gazelles, the kangaroos and wallabies which despite great differences in shape, cover the same range of diet and way of life as their African counterparts.

The only marsupial left in N. America is the nocturnal Virginia opossum.

Ancestor's Trail
  1. Ancestor's Trail Hike
  2. Why Is Life On Earth Carbon-Based?
  3. Metazoans
  4. 900MYA we had a common ancestry with Choanoflagellates (non-animal eucaryotes)
  5. 800mya we had a common ancestry with Sponges
  6. 780mya we had a common ancestry with Placozoans
  7. 730mya Ctenophores
  8. 680mya Cnidarians
  9. 630mya Flatworms
  10. 590mya Protosomes
  11. 570mya Ambulacrarians
  12. 565mya Tunicates
  13. 560mya Cephalocordates
  14. 530mya Agnatha
  15. 460mya Chondrichthyes
  16. 440-450mya FIRST GREAT EXTINCTION
  17. 440mya Actinopterygii
  18. 417mya Dipnoi
  19. 360-375mya SECOND GREAT EXTINCTION
  20. 340mya Amphibians
  21. 310mya Sauropsids (lizard-faced non-mammalian chordates)
  22. 251mya THIRD GREAT EXTINCTION
  23. 205mya FOURTH GREAT EXTINCTION
  24. 180mya Monotremes
  25. 140mya Marsupials
  26. 105mya Afrotheres
  27. 95mya Xenarthrans
  28. 85mya Laurasiatheres
  29. 75mya Glires (Rodents and Lagomorphs)
  30. 70mya Non-primate Eurachonta (Cologus and Tree shrews)
  31. 65mya FIFTH GREAT EXTINCTION
  32. 63mya Prosimians
  33. 58mya Tarsiers
  34. 40mya Platyrrhini
  35. 25mya Catarrhini
  36. 18mya Lesser Apes
  37. 14mya Orangutans
  38. 7mya Gorillas
  39. 6mya Chimpanzees and Bonobos
  40. Human Evolution on the Ancestor's Trail
  41. 7 BILLION HUMANS