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Mountain Pygmy Possum — printable fact sheet
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Mountain Pygmy Possum
Burramys parvus
Burramys parvus was described from a fossil in 1896 and assumed extinct for over 60 years, until a live one walked into a ski lodge at Mount Hotham in 1966 — one of the very few mammals known to science as a fossil before it was known alive. It is Australia's only marsupial that…
Did you know?
- The Mountain Pygmy Possum was believed extinct until its rediscovery in 1966, when a living specimen was found in a ski lodge basement in Victoria, Australia.
- A road at Mount Higginbotham cut the boulder field in half, separating females from a male-only zone, so engineers built a "tunnel of love" — an underpass of rocks — and breeding success in the isolated group recovered. Females hold the best boulder-field habitat and males live at the margins, an unusual reversal in mammals, and males must cross open ground each spring to breed. Bogong moths navigate hundreds of kilometres to specific caves using the Earth's magnetic field and visual cues, and the possum's whole life cycle is timed to their arrival.
What I learned
Draw the mountain pygmy possum
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