O hi

I was watching a Breaking Bad episode recently where the character Jesse is talking about possums.

Possum. Big, freaky, lookin' bitch. Since when did they change it to opossum? When I was comin' up it was just possum. Opossum makes it sound like he's irish or something. Why do they gotta go changing everything?

Now I've never actually seen a possum, or an opossum or whatever but I knew of the animal and had heard people say it both ways, so I too was curious.

The short version of the story is that the animal that lives in North America is called an opossum and possums are marsupials that live in Australia and some of the surrounding islands.  Apparently opossums were given their name back in the 1600s and in the late 1700s the Australian animal was named a possum because it looked like the American opossum.

However in the US, opossum is often shorted to just 'possum or possum which has created the confusion.  Visibly the two species are fairly different, though they are both marsupials.  For example possums have a furry tail while opossums have a hairless tail.  They are however both nocturnal omnivores that will "play possum" when under threat.

Opossum

Possum