The furry marsupials that scurry, hop and glide across Australia may have a more complicated evolutionary lineage than first thought.
Ancient sets of teeth discovered by researchers suggest the mammal subgroup that includes charismatic critters like quolls, wallabies and sugar gliders may need to add an extra branch to the family tree.
Australia's marsupials were thought to have descended from a common ancestral lineage that arrived from South America more than 50 million years ago, via Antarctica.
Now, fossils discovered in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in northwest Queensland indicate more variety among early marsupial fauna.
Lead author of the study published in the Journal of Paleontology, University of New South Wales palaeontologist Tim Churchill, said the three new small, insect-eating species were not closely related to the other marsupials living alongside them.
