Western Quoll - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The western quoll was described by John Gould in 1841, when it was still widespread throughout the continent. Its species name, geoffroii, refers to the prominent French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who named the genus Dasyurus in 1796. The species has sometimes been placed in the genus Dasyurinus.

The western quoll is a member of the family Dasyuridae and is most closely related to the Bronze Quoll (Dasyurus spartacus), a recently described species from New Guinea that was for some time believed to be an outlying population of the western quoll.