Are there any marsupials in New Zealand?

Answer 1

New Zealand has no native marsupials, however there are some small populations of introduced wallabies living in the wild. There are also millions of Common Brushtail Possums, which were introduced to the islands by settlers wanting to start a fur industry.

Answer 2

Actually there are lots of native animals in New Zeland like sharks, birds, reptiles and insects. But there are no native mammals except for bats and marine mammals. An explanation would be that New Zeland is an isolated country, so walking mammals couldn't get there. But birds can fly and reach it. So those birds evolved into reptiles and the evolution process continued. But this is just an hypothesis. ---- One problem with the above hypothesis is that some of the endemic NZ birds are flightless, whilst there are also ancient reptile species, such as the tuatara, which is more closely related to the dinosaur than any other reptile - so apparently it was there before the current bird species.

Answer 3

NZ's only native mammals are a couple of bats. (Apart from sea life such as seals and dolphins, a number of which are endemic. )

After the break up of Gondwana, New Zealand appears to not have had any mammalian migration, and in more recent times, < 15 million years, there were a series of ice ages, and also times when the present land was largely submerged.

These conditions are not comfortable to mammals. The Kiwi, Moa, and Tuatara all seemed to have made it through however.

So our fauna is mainly birds and lizards (+ skinks) and these had little competition and no serious predation. Apart from the 'recent' arrival of Pouakai - Haast's Eagle, and the Karearea - Falcon and other hawks.

Many of the current small birds are recent, and identifiably, migrants from Australia.

The downside of this of course is that the native bird population was ill equipped to deal with the stoats, weasels, and so on - particularly the ground dwelling birds.

So the short answer is that the geological history of NZ was not suited to the arrival of mammals.

[And remember that our neighbour Australia has a similar lack of Laurasian mammals, and the Australian native mammals went on an evolutionary path of their own. The Monotremes, Kangaroo; and their birds.]

Answer 4

New Zealand has just one native mammal - the bat, or pekapeka. However, it has a variety of unique birdlife which has adapted to life on the islands much the way Australia has its unique marsupials. One suggestion is simply that the lack of natural mammal predators in New Zealand allowed the birds to adapt and develop into the many and varied unique species there are today. Perhaps, before the continents and islands broke off, the New Zealand land mass contained more suitable bird habitats, and these creatures gravitated towards that area, enabling them to really proliferate once they were free of mammalian predators.