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Although the northern mountain brush-tail possum, found north of Sydney through to Gladstone in Queensland, has a bigger, brushier tail and shorter ears, scientists had previously thought it was the same species as its southern cousin found in Victoria and southern New South Wales. But the possums are genetically different and the northern variety has been renamed the short-eared possum.
David Lindenmayer, of the Australian National University, and his wife, Karen Viggers, made the discovery after two months on the east coast studying possums, during which Dr Viggers was seeking a natural parasite to the common brush-tail possum, which has reached plague proportions in New Zealand.
"It's not a pest and it's certainly never going to be a pest," Dr Lindenmayer said of the short-eared possum. "It's quite a different beast (to the brush-tail possum) and that different beast turns out to be not one but two different beasts. It's an exciting development that we weren't expecting from our work."
He described the situation as being "like the state of origin of the possum world", with the division of the two forest-dwelling possums occurring somewhere around the Blue Mountains. The mountain brush-tail and the short-eared possums live in the hollows of dead and fallen trees in rainforest areas, unlike the common brush-tail variety that is often found in suburban areas and looks more like a fox with a pointy face and ears.
Neither species is endangered but Dr Lindenmayer said logging and charcoal production in the wet forests and rainforests could have disastrous effects.
"This animal spends half of its life, the daytime, living in very large trees with hollows that take a couple of hundred years to develop, and if we embark on these very intensive logging practices then the sorts of habitats that these animals live in will be greatly degraded," he said.
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