The marsupial family Potoridae includes the bettongs, potoroos and rat-kangaroos. All are small, brown, jumping marsupials and resemble a large rodent or a very small wallaby.
The potoroids are, like nearly all diprotodonts, herbivorous. However, while they take a wide variety of vegetable foods, most have a particular taste for the fruiting bodies of fungi, and often depend on fungi to see them through periods when there is little else to eat in the dry Australian bush.
There are five species of bettong: including the Northern Bettong (Bettongia tropica) and the Tasmanian Bettong (Bettongia gaimadi). Bettongs were endangered because settlers took much of their habitat and their foxes also killed many of them. At one time, both species lived all over Australia. But today, the Tasmanian Bettong lives only in the eastern half of Tasmania, and the Northern Bettong lives only in three isolated populations in northern Queensland.
The kangaroo group including kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, rat kangaroos, tree kangaroos, potoroos, bettongs, quokkas, and pademelons belong to two families within the order Diprotodontia.
The Potoridae basically refers to the rat-kangaroos and the Macropodidae refers to all other kangaroos.
Out of nearly 60 living species of kangaroo in the world, more than half are in the family Potoroidae.
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