No marsupial species are native to Europe, Asia, or Africa.
It was once thought modern placental mammals evolved from marsupials, but recent fossil evidence disputes this assumption.
The earliest known marsupial is Sinodelphys szalayi, which lived in China around 125 million years ago.
On many continents placental mammals were much more successful and no marsupials survived.
However, fossils of a marsupial species called Sinodelphys or “Chinese opossum”, an extinct mammal from the Early Cretaceous, were recently found in China.
It is currently the oldest marsupial fossil known, estimated to be 125 million years old, and is the only one of its kind found.
It was discovered in 2003 in the Yixian Formation in Liaoning Province, China, by a team of scientists.
Of the 260 known marsupial species, just a couple live in the Americas, and the rest live in Australia and the Australasian islands that surround it.
