Robert S. Voss and Sharon A. Jansa - Opossums: An Adaptive Radiation of New World Marsupials

We are very fortunate in having colleagues who were willing to read early drafts of our chapters and suggest improvements. In particular, we are grateful to Robin Beck for reading . Any remaining errors of fact, interpretation, or emphasis are, of course, our own.

Patricia J. Wynne drew all the line art for this volume with her customary skill, attention to detail, and inimitable style. Photographic material was made available by friends, colleagues, and freelance photographers whose generosity we gratefully acknowledge, whether or not we finally used their images for this volume: V ctor Acosta-Chaves, Antoine Baglan, Eduardo Beltrocco, Gerardo Ceballos, Rodrigo Conte, M nica D az, Louise Emmons, Antoine Fouquet, El Garc a-Padilla, Mario G mez-Mart nez, Roland Kays, Jorge La Grotteria, Jos Mart nez, Jos Ochoa, Ricardo Ojeda, Pedro Peloso, Dar o Podest , Fiona Reid, Rog rio Rossi, Thiago Semedo, Thiago da Silveira, Pablo Teta, and Christian Ziegler. Rights to reproduce the image in were purchased from Superstock, Inc.

Patricia Wynnes drawings of opossum manual osteology ( . Jan Ryser very kindly sent us a copy of his 1990 doctoral dissertation on Didelphis.

Our decades-long research on opossums would have been far less productive without many substantial contributions from our students, including especially Juan D az-Nieto, Tom Giarla, Eliecer Guti rrez, and Silvia Pavan. Lorissa Fujishin and Carmen Martin helped generate much of the sequence data on which our phylogenetic research was based. We are also grateful to colleagues who collaborated in our work or supported it in other tangible ways over the same period, especially Keith Barker, Robin Beck, Ana Carmignotto, Fran ois Catzeflis, Louise Emmons, Dave Fleck, David Flores, Al Gardner, Darrin Lunde, Ted Macrini, Jim Patton, Rog rio Rossi, Nancy Simmons, and Sergio Solari. Lastly, we thank Tiffany Gasbarrini at Johns Hopkins University Press for her candid and insightful advice and subsequent editorial support.