white animal

The perfect house gift for a Manhattanite, didelphis virginiana.

Opossums help maintain a clean and healthy environment. They eat all types of insects including cockroaches, crickets, beetles, etc. They catch and eat rats and mice. They consume dead animals of all types. They like overripe fruit, berries and grapes that have fallen to the ground and they think that snails and slugs are a delicacy. They are one of the few animals that regularly prey on shrews and moles. They are known as "Nature's Little Sanitation Engineers!"--pleasebekind.com

The Virginia Opossum is the original animal named "opossum". The word comes from Algonquian 'wapathemwa' meaning "white animal", not Greek or Latin, so the plural is opossums. Colloquially, the Virginia Opossum is frequently called simply possum. The name is applied more generally to any of the other marsupials of the Didelphimorphia and Paucituberculata orders, which includes a number of opossum species in South America.--Wikipedia

River Possum
Road Possum