Didelphidae, Gray, 1821

Voss, Robert S., Fleck, David W. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2019, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 3: Marsupials (Didelphimorphia), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2019 (432), pp. 1-89 : 13

Family Didelphidae

All the marsupials that occur in Amazonia are members of the order Didelphimorphia , which contains this single family of living species, commonly known as opossums. The marsupial fauna of the Yavarí-Ucayali interfluve includes members of all four extant didelphid subfamilies: one species each of Caluromyinae , Glironiinae , and Hyladelphinae , plus 16 species of Didelphinae . At least one additional caluromyine species and another three didelphine species are known from localities north and south of our region and might also be expected to occur there as well (appendix 2). The following accounts follow the classification of Voss and Jansa (2009), who provided a key and morphological diagnoses for the genera, tribes, and subfamilies of Recent opossums. Emmons’ (1997) field guide contains illustrations and descriptions of external characters for all the genera and some of the species mentioned below, but recent revisionary work (e.g., Rossi et al., 2010; Díaz-Nieto and Voss, 2016; Voss et al., 2018) has resulted in numerous changes to Emmons’ species-level taxonomy.

ETHNOBIOLOGY: The Matses classify opossums into three categories: (1) cheka, which includes everything except short-tailed opossums and the common opossum; (2) yama, which includes sev- eral local species of short-tailed opossums (Monodephis spp.); and (3) mapiokos, the common opossum ( Didelphis marsupialis ). Only the first category is divided into named subtypes: abuk cheka, the “woolly opossum” ( Caluromys lanatus ); cheka bëbëdi, “four-eyed opossums” ( Metachirus and Philander spp. ); and chekampi, “mouse opossums” (including all local species of small, long-tailed, black-masked didelphines plus Hyladelphys kalinowskii ).