Faculty, Staff, and Students, It is hard to believe that another school year is winding down so quickly. With my visits to classrooms, meeting rooms, and extra-curricluar events during the school year, I have noticed the great work each of you are doing. Students, employees, and parents have been eager to share with me so many great stories about the collective work happening in our school district.
When Australia separated from the ancient super-continent, many marsupial species got isolated on Australia, and then diversified into many more species that fill a variety of ecological niches. As a result, there are more species of marsupials in Australia than anywhere else in the world-- about 144 species (Bennett, 2000). Marsupials are mammals: they have fur, bear live young rather than laying eggs, feed their young with mother's milk from a nipple, and show quite a bit of parental care --sometimes for longer than a year. What makes marsupials unique among mammals is the female's pouch where the young finish their development after birth. A young marsupial is born after only a few weeks as an embryo. It may be less than one centimeter in length and very helpless. It has large front paws that it uses to climb through the mother's fur to reach the pouch.
Although a mammal with a pouch is always a marsupial (with the exception of the echidna, which develops a rudimentary pouch during breeding season), not all marsupials have pouches, for example, the numbat of Western Australia. All marsupials are mammals, but not all mammals are marsupials.enguins are not marsupials, or even mammals. They are members of the bird family, sharing bird characteristics of laying eggs, having feathers (of sorts), and being warm-bloo â¦ ded vertebrates that breathe through lungs.