Difference Between Possum and Opossum
Possums look like skinny, rat-like creatures—or so I thought. You see them crawling along the roads at night, sharp-toothed tufts of fur with long bare tails trailing behind. But one day I visited a museum that had skins of dozens of different animals on display. Some were soft, some had coarse guard hairs, and then I stroked the opossum’s fur almost jokingly. Like, how bad it will feel. It was heavenly . Possum fur remains to this day the softest fur I have ever touched.
I do not say all this to praise the virtues of the poor misunderstood opossum, although there are many of them. I say this to indicate that, as a North American familiar with this animal, I call it the opossum. As the others. You don’t say to your neighbor, “Oh, my dog brought in a dead Didelphis virginiana yesterday”; You say, “My dog found a dead opossum.”
Now that we’ve established that, we need to talk about another animal: the Australian Trichosurus vulpecula , or the common brush-tailed opossum. Both opossums are marsupials, both live in and near cities, and both are commonly referred to as opossums.
So what is a possum?
The name “possum” is a shortened version of the word “possum”, and the word “possum” itself comes from the Virginian Algonquian word that the colonizers wrote as “apossun” or “opassom” , according to Merriam-Webster . (The exact original word is unknown.)
The North American animal is called “Virginia possum” in a formal context, and “opossum” almost everywhere.
Meanwhile, the letter “o” seems to have got lost somewhere between Virginia and Australia, and the official English name for the Australian animal is “brush-tailed opossum.” Merriam-Webster points out that if you want to refer specifically to the animals of the southern hemisphere, there is a word for them: phalanges .
Then there are people who will get pedantic and say that North America has possums and Australia has possums, but that’s only true if you speak a fancy academic language (in which case you might as well use the scientific names) . Possum is one of the correct names for the scruffy but actually squishy rat-tailed creature that crosses roads at night, but it’s not the only correct name. As is clear from the dictionary , both names are suitable for both animals.