Afrotheria is a clade of mammals, the living members of which include golden moles, sengis (also known as elephant shrews), tenrecs, aardvarks, hyraxes, elephants and sea cows.
Afrotheria was originally proposed in 1998 based on analyses of DNA sequence data. However, previous studies hinting at the close interrelationships among subsets of endemic African mammals date to the 1920s , and much later sporadic papers in the 1980s and 1990s . The cor...
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Afrotheria is a clade of mammals, the living members of which include golden moles, sengis (also known as elephant shrews), tenrecs, aardvarks, hyraxes, elephants and sea cows.
Afrotheria was originally proposed in 1998 based on analyses of DNA sequence data. However, previous studies hinting at the close interrelationships among subsets of endemic African mammals date to the 1920s , and much later sporadic papers in the 1980s and 1990s . The core of Afrotheria consists of the Paenungulata, i.e., elephants, sea cows, and hyraxes, a group with a long history among comparative anatomists. Hence, while DNA sequence data have proven essential to infer the existence of Afrotheria as a whole, and while the insectivoran-grade afrotheres (tenrecs, golden moles, sengis) would probably not have been recognized as part of Afrotheria without DNA data, there is some precedent in the comparative anatomical literature for the idea that at least part of this group forms a clade.
Since the 1990s,...
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