From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Extinct superfamily of carnivores
Miacoidea ("small points") is a former
paraphyletic
superfamily of extinct
placental mammals that lived during the
Paleocene and
Eocene epochs, about 66-33,9 million years ago.
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7] This group had been traditionally divided into two
families of primitive carnivorous mammals:
Miacidae (the miacids) and
Viverravidae (the viverravids). These mammals were basal to order
Carnivora , the
crown-group within the
Carnivoramorpha .
Biology
Miacoids were mostly small carnivorous mammals, superficially reminiscent of
martens or
civets . They probably fed on invertebrates,
lizards ,
birds and smaller
mammals like
shrews and
rodents , while others may have been
insectivores . Some species were
arboreal , others lived on the
ground . Their
teeth and
skull show that the miacoids were less developed than modern carnivores.
Classification
Superfamily: †Miacoidea (Cope, 1880)
Phylogeny
References
^ E. D. Cope (1880.)
"On the genera of the Creodonta." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 19:76-82
^ J. J. Hooker (1986.)
"Mammals from the Bartonian (middle/late Eocene) of the Hampshire Basin, southern England." Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) 39(4):191-478
^ Robert L. Carroll (1988.)
"Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution." W. H. Freeman and Company, New York,
Miacoidea
^ McKenna, Malcolm C.; Bell, Susan K. (1997).
Classification of Mammals Above the Species Level . New York: Columbia University Press.
ISBN
978-0-231-11012-9 . Retrieved 16 March 2015 .
^ J. J. Flynn (1998.) "Early Cenozoic Carnivora ("Miacoidea")." In C. M. Janis, K. M. Scott and L. L. Jacobs (eds. )
"Evolution of Tertiary Mammals of North America. Volume 1: Terrestrial Carnivores, Ungulates, and Ungulatelike Mammals." Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
ISBN
9780521355193
^ T. J. Meehan and R. W. Wilson (2002)
"New viverravids from the Torrejonian (Middle Paleocene) of Kutz Canyon, New Mexico and the oldest skull of the order Carnivora." Journal of Paleontology 76(6):1091-1101
^ K. D. Rose, A. E. Chew, R. H. Dunn, M. J. Kraus, H. C. Fricke and S. P. Zack (2012)
"Earliest Eocene mammalian fauna from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum at Sand Creek Divide, southern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming." University of Michigan Papers on Paleontology 36:1-122