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HOME --> CLASS MAMMALIA
--> ORDER RODENTIA
--> SUBORDER MYOMORPHA
--> SUPERFAMILY Dipodoidea
--> FAMILY Dipodidae
SUBFAMILY Allactaginae
| Author: | Vinogradov, 1925. | | Citation: | Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1925(1): 578. | | Comments: | Dental morphology and evolution studied by Shenbrot (1984). Allactodipodini was proposed for Allactodipus (Zazhigin and Lopatin, 2000a), but no type genus was explicitly indicated. Modern range of the subfamily is Asian (only Allactaga tetradactyla occurs in north Africa) and its evolutionary roots are in that continent. The first allactagine may have evolved from Asian late Oligocene Gobiosminthus (Zazhigin and Lopatin, 2000c) or Parasminthus (Wang and Qiu, 2000; McKenna and Bell, 1997, treat both genera as synonyms of Plesiosminthus) into two major lineages (Zazhigin and Lopatin, 2000c). One is represented by species of Protalactaga, the first true allactagines, from latter portion of Asian early Miocene, and may have been ancestral to Allactaga, which first appears in the later half of Asian late Miocene and is represented by an array of species in the Pliocene. Pygerethmus dates from the late Pliocene; it and the extinct Asian Brachyscirtetes (late Miocene to early Pliocene) may have been derived from Allactaga. Allactodipus bobrinskii, unrepresented by fossils, is the other lineage, and Zazhigin and Lopatin (2000c) speculated a North African or Near East origin for the genus. To taxonomically reflect this evolutionary duality, Zazhigin and Lopatin (2000a) separated Allactodipus in a tribe separate from the other allactagines. Outside of Asia, Miocene Allactaginae are represented by Arabosminthus from Saudia Arabia (late Miocene, usually treated as a zapodid; R. A. Martin, 1994; McKenna and Bell, 1997) and a middle Miocene sample from Morocco originally identified as "Protalactaga moghrebiensis" (Jaeger, 1977b) that likely represents an undescribed genus (Zazhigin and Lopatin, 2000c). Himalayactaga, from late Miocene Tibetan strata, is usually regarded as an allactagine (e. g., McKenna and Bell, 1997), but Zazhigin and Lopatin (2000c:554) considered it of "uncertain taxonomic position within the Myomorpha." European late Pliocene and Pleistocene records of Allactaga and Pygerethmus are summarized by Kowalski (2001). |
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