Dasyuromorphia
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Dasyuromorphia (Template:IPAc-en, meaning "hairy tail"[1] in Greek) is an order comprising most of the Australian carnivorous marsupials, including quolls, dunnarts, the numbat, the Tasmanian devil, and the extinct thylacine. The order contains four families: one, the Myrmecobiidae, with just a single living species (the numbat), two with only extinct species (including the thylacine and Malleodectes), and one, the Dasyuridae, with 73 extant species.
Characteristics
Unlike herbivores, which tend to become highly specialized for particular ecological niches and diversify greatly in form, carnivores tend to be broadly similar to one another, certainly on the level of gross external form. Just as Northern Hemisphere carnivores like cats, mongooses, foxes and weasels are much more alike in structure than, for example, camels, goats, pigs and giraffes, so too are the marsupial predators constrained to retain general-purpose, look-alike forms—forms which mirror those of placental carnivores. The names given to them by early European settlers reflect this: the thylacine was called the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf, quolls were called native cats or native foxes, and so on.
The primary specialisation among marsupial predators is that of size: prior to the massive environmental changes that came about with the arrival of humans about 50,000 years ago, there were several very large carnivores, none of them members of the Dasyuromorphia and all of them now extinct. Those that survived into historical times ranged from the wolf-sized thylacine to the tiny long-tailed planigale which at 4 to 6 grams is less than half the size of a mouse. Most, however, tend towards the lower end of the size scale, typically between about 15 or 20 grams and about 2 kilograms, or from the size of a domestic mouse to that of a small domestic cat.
Phylogeny
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| Upham et al. 2019[2][3] | Álvarez-Carretero et al. 2022[4][5] |
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See also
References
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External links
- Dasyuromorphia on Animal Diversity Web
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