This possum looks like a black and white squirrel. It is solitary, mostly nocturnal, arboreal, and builds nests in tree branches. The body length is approx. 263 mm long, tail 325 mm, and weight 423 g. The striped possum's tail is prehensile. Its fourth finger is elongated relative to the others (like the third finger of the aye-aye, a lemur found in Malagasy rainforests) and is used to take beetles and caterpillars from tree bark, making it a "mammalian woodpecker". The striped possum also eats leaves, fruits, and small vertebrates. Its main diet consists of wood-boring insect larvae, which are extracted from rotten branches probing with its elongated fourth finger and its powerful incisor teeth which are used to rip open tree bark to expose insects. It detects the larvae by a rapid drumming along branches with the toes of its forefoot. The fourth finger has an unusual hooked nail which it uses to extract insects out of cracks.