hey...let's honor and not disrespect North America's only marsupial
we honor them, by eating them:
"Strachey's notes describe the opossum as a "beast in bigness of a pig and in taste alike," "The Virginia opossum was once widely hunted and consumed in the United States. Opossum farms have been operated in the United States in the past. Sweet potatoes were eaten together with the possum in America's southern area. South Carolina cuisine includes opossum, and President Jimmy Carter hunted opossums in addition to other small game. Raccoon, opossum, partridges, prairie hen, and frogs were among the fare Mark Twain recorded as part of American cuisine.(
weeeeeeki)
and one of the few mammals that lived during the dinosaurs time and still around today
not quite:
The study, to be published in PLoS One on Dec. 16, shows that peradectids, a family of marsupials known from fossils mostly found in North America and Eurasia, are a sister group of all living opossums.
(...)
Opossum-like peradectids first appeared on the continent about 65 million years ago, at the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which killed the dinosaurs.
(...)
The study also analyzes two 30-million-year-old skeletons of Herpetotheriidae, the sister group of all living marsupials.
Based on fossil evidence from the skull and two skeletons, the study's authors concluded the evolutionary split between the ancestor of opossums and the ancestor of all other living marsupials occurred at least 65 million years ago (
sciencedaily)
so it's the ancestor of the opposum, not the opposum itself, that emerged
after the dinosaur's extinction.
KNOW YOUR HISTORY IF YOU'RE GOING TO CLAIM TO BE A FAN.
(aside: for xmas, i'll be going to the closest point on land to the impact site of the meteor that caused the K/T extinction event - wo0t!)
