Viverravidae

This article is about an extinct family of carnivorous mammals. For the extant family of carnivorans, see Viverridae.

Viverravidae
Temporal range: 66.043–33.9 Ma early Paleocene - late Eocene
skull of Viverravus minutus
skull of Didymictis protenus
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Clade: Pan-Carnivora
Clade: Carnivoramorpha
Superfamily: †Viverravoidea
Wortman & Matthew, 1899
Family: †Viverravidae
Wortman & Matthew, 1899[1]
Type genus
†Viverravus
Marsh, 1872
Genera
[see classification]
Synonyms
synonyms of family:
  • Didymictida (Kretzoi, 1945)[2]
  • Didymictidae (Flynn & Galiano, 1982)[3]
  • Viverravidea
  • Viverravinae (Matthew, 1909)[4]

Viverravidae ("ancestors of viverrids") is an extinct monophyletic family of mammals from extinct superfamily Viverravoidea within the clade Carnivoramorpha, that lived from the early Palaeocene to the late Eocene in North America, Europe and Asia.[5][6][7] They were once thought to be the earliest carnivorans and ancestral to extant ones, but now are placed outside the order Carnivora based on cranial morphology as relatives (a plesion-group) to extant carnivorans.[8][9]

  1. ^ Wortman, J. L.; Matthew, W. D. (1899). "The ancestry of certain members of the Canidae, Viverridae, and Procyonidae". Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 12: 109–138. hdl:2246/1535. OCLC 46687698.
  2. ^ Miklos Kretzoi (1945) "Bemerkungen über das Raubtiersystem." Annales Historico-Naturales Musei Nationalis Hungarici, Budapest, vol. 38, pp. 59–83.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Flynn1982 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ W. D. Matthew (1909) "The Carnivora and Insectivora of the Bridger Basin, middle Eocene." Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 9:289-567
  5. ^ "†family Viverravidae (Wortman & Matthew, 1899) (placental)". Fossilworks. Gateway to the Paleobiology Database. Retrieved 29 June 2019.
  6. ^ Malcolm C. McKenna, Susan K. Bell: Classification of Mammals: Above the Species Level in Columbia University Press, New York (1997), 631 Seiten. Viverravidae
  7. ^ Zack, Shawn P. (2012). "Deciduous dentition of Didymictis (Carnivoramorpha: Viverravidae): implications for the first appearance of "Creodonta"". Journal of Mammalogy. 93 (3): 808–817. doi:10.1644/11-MAMM-A-245.1. ISSN 0022-2372.
  8. ^ Wesley-Hunt, G. D.; Flynn, J. J. (2005). "Phylogeny of the Carnivora: basal relationships among the carnivoramorphans, and assessment of the position of 'Miacoidea' relative to Carnivora". Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. 3: 1–28. doi:10.1017/S1477201904001518. S2CID 86755875.
  9. ^ Polly, David, Gina D. Wesley-Hunt, Ronald E. Heinrich, Graham Davis and Peter Houde (2006). "Earliest known carnivoran auditory bulla and support for a recent origin of crown-clade carnivora (Eutheria, Mammalia)" (PDF). Palaeontology. 49 (5): 1019–1027. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4983.2006.00586.x.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)