…so, some more about those metatherians/marsupials.

In the previous part to this two part series, I went over some of the now-extinct metatherian megafauna that once graced Australia and South America. These animals were fantastic and marvelous pinnacles of metatherian specialization, yes, but there are plenty of surviving metatherians, all of them of the ‘marsupial’ clade, that are also largely ignored and their lives obscured. There are some truly bizarre and amazing marsupials outside of the traditional koala/kangaroo/wombat/possum group that essentially everyone on the planet associates with the marsupial infraclass, and all of them somehow survived invading hoardes of humans and other placental species (although, in most cases, just barely).