Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps)
Sugar Glider. Photo: Dick Whitford/Nature Focus © Australian Museum.
Lived: 1.6 million years ago (Pleistocene) to the present
Size: Length (head and body): up to 21 centim
Description: The Sugar Glider is a possum with a gliding membrane between its front and back legs. It lives in dry forests, where it leaps and glides from tree to tree, seeking out food. The Sugar Glider eats insects, pollen, the sap of trees, and honeydew (a sugary liquid produced by insects). It also uses its teeth to gash wounds in the trunks of eucalypt trees, then licks the sap that oozes from these cuts.
The Sugar Glider is not closely related to the Feather-tailed Glider or the Greater Glider (which belong to different possum families), nor to the placental gliding rodents. Each of these groups became gliders independently, allowing them to move between trees without descending to the ground (where hungry predators wait). This is a classic example of convergent evolution.
Fossils: Sugar Glider fossils (teeth, jaws and other bones) have been found in many sites in eastern Australia.
Did you know?: The Sugar Glider lives over a greater range of latitudes than any other Australian marsupial. It lives in northern, eastern and south-eastern Australia, in Tasmania (to which it was probably introduced in the 19th century), in New Guinea and on several small islands around New Guinea.
