OPOSSUM

Of the long list of novel creatures featured in early modern descriptions of the New World, the opossum stands out as particularly curious. On the one hand, numerous testimonies point to the opossum’s ‘composite’ or ‘chimerical’ appearance, conventionally referring to it as ‘monstrous’. Thus Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (1462– 1514), whose account is regarded as one of the earliest, refers to it as a ‘Monster, the foremost part resembling a Fox, the hinder a Monkey, the feet were like a Man’s, with Ears like an Owl’. Of particular interest to the history of the opossum as an object-image of knowledge is the treatise entitled Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658). Nieremberg presents and contrasts a number of descriptions of the opossum, which he calls by its Nahuatl name tlaquatzin/tlacuatzin, starting with materials compiled by Francisco Hernández (1514–87). Nieremberg presents a new illustration of the opossum that represents a female tlacuatzin and her offspring.