section_path: Interaction with Europeans
section_name: Interaction with Europeans
paragraph_text: Interaction with Europeans
  
  Europeans' first encounter with a marsupial was the common opossum. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, commander of the Niña on Christopher Columbus ' first voyage in the late fifteenth century, collected a female opossum with young in her pouch off the South American coast. He presented them to the Spanish monarchs, though by then the young were lost and the female had died. The animal was noted for its strange pouch or "second belly".
  
  The Portuguese first described Australasian marsupials: António Galvão, a Portuguese administrator in Ternate (1536–1540), wrote a detailed account of the northern common cuscus (Phalanger orientalis):
  
  Some animals resemble ferrets, only a little bigger. They are called Kusus. They have a long tail with which they hang from the trees in which they live continuously, winding it once or twice around a branch. On their belly they have a pocket like an intermediate balcony; as soon as they give birth to a young one, they grow it inside there at a teat until it does not need nursing anymore. As soon as she has borne and nourished it, the mother becomes pregnant again.
  
  In the 17th century, more accounts of marsupials emerged. A 1606 record of an animal killed on the southern coast of New Guinea, described it as "in the shape of a dog, smaller than a greyhound", with a snakelike "bare scaly tail" and hanging testicles. The meat tasted like venison, and the stomach contained ginger leaves. This description appears to closely resemble the dusky pademelon (Thylogale brunii), the earliest European record of a member of the Macropodidae.