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HOME --> CLASS MAMMALIA
ORDER ERINACEOMORPHA
| Author: | Gregory, 1910. | | Comments: | Formerly included in the Insectivora (as in the last edition; Hutterer, 1993a) or Lipotyphla, but treated here as a separate order in consequence of the obvious paraphyletic nature of the Insectivora clade (Asher et al., 2002; Stanhope et al., 1998). Various genetic studies (Emerson et al., 1999; Liu et al., 2001; Mouchaty et al., 2000a, b; Nikaido et al., 2001) demonstrated that hedgehogs and soricomorphs keep distant positions in phylogenetic trees. Such results reflect ideas earlier expressed by paleontologists (Butler, 1988; McKenna, 1975) and are corroborated by a careful study of the morphology and relationships of fossil and extant zalambdodont mammals by Asher et al. (2002). The name Erinaceomorpha was proposed by Gregory (1910) and has since been widely used in the paleontological literature. It is adopted here in the sense of McKenna (1975) and Butler (1988). MacPhee and Novacek (1993) used it as a name for a suborder of Lipotyphla of unresolved relationships to other clades such as soricomorphs and chrysochloromorphs. |
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