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Description
Megadidelphis is a fictional clade of medium sized digitigrade marsupials sharing Didelphis virginiana as a common ancestor

Megadidelphis arose as forest habitat began being replaced by grassland and semi desert habitat requiring the slow, tree dwelling opossum to to become faster and more agile to survive

megadidelphids as a group have longer legs and tend to be larger, dog to goat sized. the need for safety in numbers also made it that more gregarious opossums were more likely to survive than others, as a result, most Megadidelphids are social animals to some degree.

this is mostly a self indulgent project to make a marsupial diversity in Temperate North America to rival that of australia, using Just The Virginia Opossum as a starting point. Opossums, for those who don't know are super dang primitive and are god-tier generalists, that have been around basically forever. they also have managed to flourish on a continent with Placentals, whereas Australian fauna are heavily threatened by invasive placental mammals.

Anyway, i feel theres a lot of fertile ground to imagine some other forms an opossum could evolve towards given the right selective pressures.

These dog-like megadidelphids were the first step i made, since opossums are pretty close anatomically (though not genetically) to Dasyurmorphia (taz devils, Thylacine, and quolls) so it seemed like a good logical step that a large carnivorous, futurepossum would resemble a thylacine. this individual is a highly generalized megadidelphis to give the basic idea of what they are. there are of course many different families, genera and species with a varying degree of size, color and other characteristics.

Description
Megadidelphis is a fictional clade of medium sized digitigrade marsupials sharing Didelphis virginiana as a common ancestor

Megadidelphis arose as forest habitat began being replaced by grassland and semi desert habitat requiring the slow, tree dwelling opossum to to become faster and more agile to survive

megadidelphids as a group have longer legs and tend to be larger, dog to goat sized. the need for safety in numbers also made it that more gregarious opossums were more likely to survive than others, as a result, most Megadidelphids are social animals to some degree.

this is mostly a self indulgent project to make a marsupial diversity in Temperate North America to rival that of australia, using Just The Virginia Opossum as a starting point. Opossums, for those who don't know are super dang primitive and are god-tier generalists, that have been around basically forever. they also have managed to flourish on a continent with Placentals, whereas Australian fauna are heavily threatened by invasive placental mammals.

Anyway, i feel theres a lot of fertile ground to imagine some other forms an opossum could evolve towards given the right selective pressures.

These dog-like megadidelphids were the first step i made, since opossums are pretty close anatomically (though not genetically) to Dasyurmorphia (taz devils, Thylacine, and quolls) so it seemed like a good logical step that a large carnivorous, futurepossum would resemble a thylacine. this individual is a highly generalized megadidelphis to give the basic idea of what they are. there are of course many different families, genera and species with a varying degree of size, color and other characteristics.