#just found $100 from the pouch of an opossum!

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Roadkill Story

Roadkill Beats

A half-eaten bag of Gay’s potato chips is gently pushed into an alley by the breeze. As it slides along, it catches the eye of an opossum, who scuttles over to investigate.

Another opossum enters the scene, drawn in by the aroma of chips and the gentle crinkle of the plastic bag.

The two stare at each other unblinking. As one takes a tentative step towards the bag, the other opens his mouth wide, but no sound comes out. The opossum that took a step returns the look. They stand like that for a long time, as possums do.

They launch into a vicious fight, and one of the opossums ends up dead. A nearby mother opossum throws her hands around wildly to try and cover the eyes of her many innocent children.

The victorious trash boy retrieves his blood-soaked prize and retires to his home beneath the dumpster close by. He crunches on the chips with unparalleled vigor and promptly falls asleep.

Our hero(?) wakes up abruptly to the sound of sirens and a sight he has never seen before. There is a crime scene in front of him, fully decked-out with crime scene tape and a chalk outline around where the body of his fallen brother once rested.

He attempts to leave his house, but the second the light touches his foot, he is confronted by officers, pointing their guns at him. One of them spits, “Your days of crime are over.” The opossum looks around nervously, he doesn’t know English.

They throw a Ziploc bag of grey fur at him. Another officer says to him, “Explain how we found THIS at the murder scene.”

The opossum still has no idea what is going on. However, since things aren’t looking particularly good, he tries to back away slowly. When the officers follow step, he tears off running.

He runs for a few seconds before coming across a opossum’s greatest love: a slice of soggy pizza. The opossum struggles to decide whether to keep running or eat the pizza. Cops begin to close the gap.

The opossum is seen running again, with a slice of soggy pizza in his mouth. He is still outrunning the officers, but they are now closer behind him.

He soon comes across something else coveted by all possums on this earth: cat food. He’s trying to desperately shove cat food in his mouth with the pizza, but it isn’t working out, and the cops catch him.

They cuff him with regular human handcuffs, pat him down and check his pouch, and throw him in the police car. He sits politely for a little bit while the officers look smug in the front.

The opossum notices the strangely large AC vent in the back of the police car. Dropping his handcuffs, because his hands are approximately 1/100th the size of a human’s, he pulls off the vent cover and wiggles his way in there.

He is shot out of some kind of pipe at the bottom of the car and rolls out onto the street. He is battered but uninjured. However, as he regains his footing, he is immediately run over flat by another car.

The officers have turned around, noticing that their arrestee has escaped. One points at the opossum’s body accusingly. “Ha! We know your tricks, opossum! You can’t fool us!” he barks. The officers stuff the dead opossum back into the car and duct tape the vent closed.

The opossum goes to trial and is sentenced to death.

In a bit of a time skip, the opossum is seen laying on the floor in the middle of a cell as morning breaks, the tire track flattening his midsection still very much there and his body still very much dead.

An unseen warden opens the cell. “Time to get up.” he commands gruffly. The possum is dead. It does not respond. “Gonna do this the hard way huh?” the warden asks before his hand enters the frame, roughly grabbing the body and pulling it out of the cell.

There is then a very speedy montage. The possum’s slowly deflating body stays still as various backgrounds such as the cafeteria and jail cell flash by.

The opossum finally makes it to the electric chair, looking pretty worse for wear. He is asked if he has any last words. He is already dead. He does not answer.

Once he is zapped, the opossum returns to the world of the living for a moment.

As he glows with the happy realization that he has received a second chance at life, the voice of the executioner can be heard saying, “Huh, you’re a resilient little bastard aren’t ya?”

The possum is electrocuted once more, and it returned to his dead state.

As his body is removed from the chair, an officer says proudly, “now you’ll never kill again. The streets are safe.”

Roadkill treatment

Two opossums encounter a half-eaten bag of chips in an alley at the same time. This, of course, is going to end horribly.

After staring at each other for an uncomfortably long time, one ends up dead and the other, victorious, takes his blood-earned treasure over to his nest under a dumpster. He munches on his chips with an intensity that only a pointy trash cat such as himself would, and then settles down for a good night’s rest.

He wakes up the next morning to see a crime scene before him. The dead opossum has had his outline chalked out and blocked off with crime scene tape, and the area is surrounded by police vehicles. The opossum is confused and starts to leave his shelter. The second his little pink hand touches the light, officers point their guns at the ruthless killer. Confronted with irrefutable evidence in the form of his grey fur found at the scene, he has no clue what is happening because he is an opossum. However, this isn’t looking good for him regardless, so he scrambles away.

As he dashes through the alleyways, he encounters a soggy slice of pizza. He sweats, eyes darting between the pizza and the approaching cops.

He continues running, pizza in hand. Or mouth.

That is, until he is confronted with another treasure coveted by his kind: cat food. He begins desperately trying to shove kibble into his mouth alongside the soggy pizza, but it isn’t working, and he gets caught. He’s pat down, cuffed, and thrown into a police vehicle. He sits quietly until he discovers a comically large AC vent in the police car and drops the cuffs that were definitely not made for tiny opossum hands before wriggling his way in. Though he makes it out just a little bit scuffed, as he goes to walk home, he is run over by another car and killed.

The police maneuver back, realizing their captive has escaped. They think the opossum is trying to trick them by playing dead, and they refuse to fall for his tricks. He is stuffed back into the police car and driven away.

The body of this dead opossum is sentenced to death, and spends his “last days” slowly getting more nasty.

Once he is brought to the electric chair, the zap of electricity actually brings him back to life. This, however, is brief, as the executioner sees that he is alive. The executioner just assumes his victim is resilient and zaps him again, killing him once more. The police leave satisfied, knowing that the streets are safe once again.

[ezatluba]

Why Are There So Many Marsupials in Australia?By

Laura Geggel

March 3, 2019

Australia is the kingdom of marsupials, home to furry kangaroos, koalas and wombats. The continent has so many marsupials, it raises the question: Did these pouch-bearing mammals arise Down Under?

The answer is an unqualified (or "un-koalafied") no. Marsupials were around for at least 70 million years before they made it to Australia, according to Robin Beck, a lecturer in biology at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom.

"Marsupials absolutely categorically did not originate in Australia," Beck told Live Science. "They are immigrants." 

In comparison to most mammals, marsupials are odd. Unlike placental mammals, such as humans, dogs and whales, marsupials give birth to relatively underdeveloped young that continue to grow a ton in the mother's pouch.

"The young are born alive, but they're very poorly developed," Beck told Live Science. "They basically crawl to their mother's nipple, which is often in a pouch, and they basically clamp on the nipple and stay there, feeding on their mother's milk for long periods of time — usually, several months."

Marsupial homeland

And it turns out, the oldest known marsupials are actually from North America, where they evolved during the Cretaceous period after splitting off from placental mammals at least 125 million years ago, Beck said.

These ancient marsupials appeared to flourish in North America, populating what was then the supercontinent Laurasia with about 15 to 20 different marsupial species, all of which are now extinct, Beck said. It's unclear why these marsupials did well. But for some reason, at about the time that the nonavian dinosaurs went extinct, about 66 million years ago, the marsupials made their way down to South America. At that time, North and South America weren't connected as they are today. But the two continents were very close, and a land bridge or a series of islands may have linked them. This connection allowed all kinds of animals to expand their stomping grounds.

Once in South America, marsupials and their close relatives had a field day, diversifying like crazy within 2 million to 3 million years after arriving, Beck said. For instance, marsupials and their close relatives evolved into bear- and weasel-size carnivores, and one even evolved saber teeth. Others evolved to eat fruits and seeds.

"What's happening in South America is they're evolving to fill the kinds of niches that in the northern continents certainly were filled by placental mammals," Beck said.

Many of these marsupials went extinct between then and now, but South America is still a marsupial hotspot today. There are more than 100 species of opossums, seven species of shrew opossums and the adorable monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides), whose Spanish name translates to "little monkey of the mountain."

On a side note, within the last 1 million years, one of South America's opossums traveled north and now lives in North America. This is the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), the only marsupial living north of Mexico, Beck said.

Also, opossums belong to a different order than possums. Possums are native to Australia and New Guinea, are closely related to kangaroos, and have a number of anatomical differences, such as enlarged lower incisors, that the South American opossum lacks, Beck said.

So, how did marsupials get from South America to Australia? 

Journey Down Under

Up until about 40 million to 35 million years ago, both South America and Australia were connected to Antarctica, forming one giant land mass. At that time, Antarctica wasn't covered with ice, but instead with a temperate rainforest, and "it was not a bad place to live," Beck said.

It appears that marsupials and their relatives bounded down from South America, strode across Antarctica and wound up in Australia, Beck said. There's even fossil evidence: On Antarctica's Seymour Island, there are fossils of marsupials and their relatives, including a close relative of the monito del monte, Beck said.

The oldest fossil marsupials from Australia are found at a 55-million-year-old site called Tingamarra, near the town of Murgon in Queensland, Beck said. Some of the fossil marsupials at Tingamarra are similar to those in South America. For instance, the ancient and tiny fruit-eating marsupial Chulpasia from Peru is a close relative of another fossil marsupial found at Tingamarra, Beck said.

Yet another Tingamarra marsupial, the insect-eating Djarthia, may be the ancestor of all living Australian marsupials, Beck said.

Then, there's a big gap in the Australian fossil record. After Tingamarra, the next oldest marsupial fossils on record are 25 million years old. "What we see then is clearly there's been a huge amount of diversification within Australia," Beck said. "By that time we see koalas, we see relatives of wombats, we see relatives of bandicoots." Basically, all of the major Australian marsupial groups are present by 25 million years ago, he said.

Again, it's unclear why marsupials thrived in Australia. But one idea is that when times were tough, marsupial mothers could jettison any developing babies they had in their pouches, while mammals had to wait until gestation was over, spending precious resources on their young, Beck said.

Another idea is that there were no placental mammals competing with the marsupials in Australia. But this idea is now contradicted, by a fossil tooth that belongs to a placental mammal or a placental-mammal relativediscovered at Tingamarra. This indicates that placental mammals were on the continent as far back as 55 million years ago, Beck said.

Today, there are about 250 marsupial species alive in Australia, around 120 marsupial species in South America and just one (the Virginia opossum) living in North America. In essence, the marsupials' ancestral geography has flipped.

"That pattern is the complete reverse of the situation 125 million years ago," Beck said. "Where things are today is not necessarily an indication of where they were millions of years ago."

As an associate editor for Live Science, Laura Geggel covers general science, including the environment, archaeology and amazing animals. She has written for The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site covering autism research. Laura grew up in Seattle and studied English literature and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis before completing her graduate degree in science writing at NYU. When not writing, you'll find Laura playing Ultimate Frisbee.