What Is the Classification of the Sugar Glider?
Sugar gliders are renowned for their ability to coast from tree to tree on skin flaps. These inhabitants of Australia, New Guinea and Indonesia are also kept in captivity as pets. Like most other native mammals of their homeland, they are marsupials, relatives of creatures like kangaroos, koalas and possums.
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The Sugar Glider
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Sugar gliders are diminutive marsupials--mammals rearing their young in pouches--inhabiting parts of New Guinea, Australia and adjoining islands. Their most distinctive features are flaps of skin connecting their front feet with their ankles, which, when the legs are extended, fan out to facilitate gliding from tree to tree. This method of traveling through a canopy conserves the glider's energy. It can sail for about 60 feet in a single glide, according to "Life of Marsupials," dropping some 33 feet in altitude in the process. Social and territorial, sugar gliders forage mostly at night, feeding on everything from insects to eucalyptus sap.
Taxonomy
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Specifically, sugar gliders belong to the class Mammalia, the order Diprotodontia, the family Petauridae and the genus Petaurus, as reported by the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology's Animal Diversity Web. Being a marsupial, it is distinguished by rearing its prematurely born young in a pouch, like kangaroos or wallabies.
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Latin Name
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The sugar glider's Latin name, Petaurus breviceps, translates to "the short headed rope-dancer."
Relatives
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Four other marsupials belong to the same genus as the sugar glider. The other species, according to "Life of Marsupials," are all heftier than the sugar glider--one New Guinean type is more than two times its size--but are not as broadly distributed. Some of these relatives, like the mahogany glider of northern Queensland, live alongside the sugar glider, occupying a slightly different ecological niche.
Convergent Evolution
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The sugar glider is a good example of convergent evolution, a process by which unrelated animals occupying similar ecological niches grow to look alike. In the glider's case, it has a look-alike in the placental mammals: the flying squirrel. Both of these little mammals have developed flaps of skin between their fore- and hind-legs, facilitating short glides between trees; and both have big, bulging eyes to feed nocturnally.
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