Origin and Early Evolution of Marsupials

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Abstract
The phytogeny of the Marsupialia is reviewed in light of recent discoveries of mammalian fossils, many attributable to development of new collecting techniques. Ancestry of the Marsupialia can be traced back to the Welsh Rhaetic pantotheres. Pappotherium and other late Early Cretaceous therians of eutherian-metatherian grade probably either represent the dental characters of the most recent common ancestors of the Marsupialia and Eutheria or may be members of this ancestral stock. Differentiation of the Marsupialia in the early Late Cretaceous was followed by a major radiation in North America. Apparently Alphadon or other didelphids with similar dentitions were the only marsupials to survive the wave of extinction at the close of the Cretaceous and successfully colonized South America and Australia in the Late Cretaceous or early Cenozoic. The appearance of marsupials in Europe in the early Eocene may have been the result of a later mammalian dispersal into the Old World including Peratherium, a descendant of Alphadon.

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