Last week I gave you this cute critter to try your hand at identifying:

I thought the presence of fur would make it easier than usual, but of course, hair hides a lot of rather useful diagnostic features that you can find more easily in the bare bones.

However, you managed to pick up on a couple of the key features that gave this specimen its name: it looks like a lagomorph (one of the hares, rabbits or pikas) or maybe a larger rodent and it looks like a macropod (one of the kangaroos, wallaroos or wallabies). Several people wondered about it being a Kangaroo-rat, but that distinctive back foot, with its big central toe and then the skinny little side toes (you have to look carefully), tells us that it’s the other way round and this is a marsupial that looks like one of the placental glires (that’s the group containing the rodents and the lagomorphs).

The marsupial identification was initially spotted by palfreyman1414 and tenaciously defended by Rebecca, who was on the right track when she veered toward it being something in the Potoroidae (the rat-kangaroos, potoroos and bettongs), a suggestion that was put forward in a more cryptic way by jennifermacaire.

This is in fact a Rufous Hare-wallaby or Mala Lagorchestes hirsutus Gould, 1844, which marsupial wrangler Jack Ashby spotted with ease:

@PaoloViscardi looks like mala or a faded hare wallaby of some other kind. Are you really asking or is this a pop quiz? Got pics of tail?

— Jack Ashby (@JackDAshby) March 3, 2017

I should say that it is indeed VERY faded, after spending over 100 years in a glass ceilinged gallery.

These small macropods live on a few islands in Western Australia, but their original wider range has been dramatically reduced by changing land use patterns resulting from the breakdown of the relationship between the Aboriginal people and the land, caused by encroachment and systematic persecution by European settlers. It’s not onlyhumans who suffer when people treat each other badly.