| rdfs:comment
| - When the first spexplorers reached Australia, they initially noticed what was different from HE, starting with the dinosaurian fauna, and working their way down through the bizarre and unexpected monotremes, tingamarrs, and gondwanatheres of the continent. Very little attention was given to the various marsupials seen scurrying through the undergrowth and climbing through the trees. It wasn't until a detailed morphological and genetic study of the continent's marsupial fauna was undertaken that it was discovered that all marsupials in Spec's Australasia were, by all indications, bandicoots.
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| abstract
| - When the first spexplorers reached Australia, they initially noticed what was different from HE, starting with the dinosaurian fauna, and working their way down through the bizarre and unexpected monotremes, tingamarrs, and gondwanatheres of the continent. Very little attention was given to the various marsupials seen scurrying through the undergrowth and climbing through the trees. It wasn't until a detailed morphological and genetic study of the continent's marsupial fauna was undertaken that it was discovered that all marsupials in Spec's Australasia were, by all indications, bandicoots. Though in present times on HE bandicoots are a comparably minor group of generalist omnivores. There is no record of them from Australia prior to the Eocene (although Australia has little in the way of terrestrial Paleocene deposits on either world. Specworld bandicoots are either heavily convergent upon HE bandicoots, if not the genuine article. Basal forms have Dasyurid-like dentition in the front of their jaw, with up to three pair of incisors and intact canines, and Diprotodont-like hind feet, with digits two and three fused to form a grooming comb. Most interestingly, they also share the distinctive bandicoot proto-placenta. Gestation is incredibly short, averaging a week in most of the smaller species. Young are generally no more developed at birth than average for metatherians, but the amount of time spent nursing is shorter than for similar sized metatheres on HE or Spec, leading to a short "in-pouch" period of one to three months. P-Peramelemorphia on Spec was far luckier than its HE analogue. The large HE clade which led to Diprotodonts and Dasyurids either never evolved, or went extinct without gracing the fossil record with any definitive species. Specworld bandicoots have evolved into virtually every small terrestrial and arboreal mammalian niche in Australasia, excluding a relative paucity of terrestrial herbivores.
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