The eastern common cuscus (''Phalanger intercastellanus'') is a species of

marsupial Marsupials are a diverse group of mammals belonging to the infraclass Marsupialia. They are natively found in Australasia, Wallacea, and the Americas. One of marsupials' unique features is their reproductive strategy: the young are born in a r ...

in the family Phalangeridae found in eastern

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. Until recently, it was considered

conspecific Biological specificity is the tendency of a characteristic such as a behavior or a biochemical variation to occur in a particular species. Biochemist Linus Pauling stated that "Biological specificity is the set of characteristics of living organism ...

with '' P. mimicus'', and before that also with '' P. orientalis''. The eastern common cuscus was introduced by humans into the Aru Islands and parts of northern Australia.

References

Possums Mammals of Papua New Guinea Mammals described in 1895 Taxa named by Oldfield Thomas Taxonomy articles created by Polbot Marsupials of New Guinea {{Diprotodont-stub