‘O’:The difference a letter was once intended to make

The opossum became known in Europe in the late 1400s as a symbol of New World wonders after one of Christopher Columbus’ co-captains collected a pregnant female in South America and presented it to the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

But, according to The Opossum: Its Amazing Story, the creature didn’t have a common name until the 1600s, when Capt. John Smith and other Jamestown Colonists (in what became Virginia) described it using an Anglicized version of the Algonquian word “apasum,” meaning “white animal.”

The confusion of the Virginia opossums and the “possums” of Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, China and Sulawesi began with the great British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks between 1768 and 1771.

Banks and his staff of eight traveled aboard the HMS Endeavour as Capt. James Cook followed the Transit of Venus. Among the species they collected in Australia were several marsupials. At the time, the only marsupial known to science was that New World oddity, the opossum. So he recorded the Aussie animals as opossums.

Over time, other scientists made note of so many significant differences that the animals were reclassified into different families, and to prevent confusion, the “o” was dropped from the scientific name of the Aussie group, which has about 70 species of various shapes and sizes.

That didn’t work.

Males of possums and opossums are called “jacks”; females are “jills”; and pouch babies are “joeys.” There is no collective noun for a group of opossums, such as “murder” of crows or “mob” of kangaroos.

— Celia Storey

Special to the Democrat-Gazette/ ANDREW MERCER A common ringtail possum stares from a tree in a Brisbane, Australia, park.