By Jeremy Varner
The author with a baby opossum playing possum
Baby possum fur is incredibly soft. I had the opportunity to hold one a while back when a baby possum came by our compost pile one evening. The Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) aka “possum” is the only marsupial that lives in the United States and Canada. That alone is a cool fact, but here is a list of other possum facts I’ve learned:
They have 50 teeth, which is more than any other North American mammal. Humans have 32.
They have low body temperatures between 94 and 97° F, which makes them very unlikely to carry rabies. You’ll hear that it’s impossible for them to get rabies, but from what I’ve read that isn’t strictly true. Either way, I don’t recommend you let one bite you.
Their brains are smooth and about 1/6 or 1/5 the size of a raccoon’s, even though the two species are about the same body size. So yes, that dumb look on their faces is reflective of possums’ inner selves.
They have opposable thumbs on their back feet.
They have 13 nipples with 6 pairs in an oval-ish pattern and one in the middle.
Only about 1 in 10 baby possums reach reproductive adulthood.
They have a prehensile tail and can hang from a tree branch by it.
Male possums have a bifurcated or two-headed penis, similar to a snake’s tongue, which works with the female possums’ two distinct sets of vaginas, uteri, and ovaries.
They really do act dead or “play possum” when threatened.
We have a compost pile which attracts an occasional opossum or racoon, but this summer we had a special visitor when a sweet baby possum came by for a snack. While it was munching on some rotting veggie scraps, I gently picked it up and it immediately went limp. I made sure to hold it so that it couldn’t bite me, but you would have guessed it was dead or at least very drunk by how limply it lay in my hand. The fur was incredibly soft, like the stomach fur of a well-groomed Maine Coon Cat. Like the kind of soft that makes you want to bury your face in it (I didn’t).
After a few pets, I laid the possum back on the compost pile and within a second or two he got right up and scurried away. Seeing the possum go from active to limp to active, like someone was flipping a switch, gave me a new appreciation for the term “playing possum.”
Based on some of the possum facts I gave above, it would be reasonable to assume they might be facing extinction, but in fact they thrive all over the place. There is a good chance an opossum has waddled through your alley or backyard one night this week. Despite being dealt a hand of mismatched cards in evolutionary poker, as it were, they keep piling up chips at their end of the table.
