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Desmostylia

Desmostylia
Temporal range: Oligocene-Miocene, 30.8–7.2 Ma
Desmostylus ROM.jpg
Desmostylus, Royal Ontario Museum
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Infraclass: Placentalia
Order: Desmostylia
Reinhart 1959
Families and genera

Desmostylia (from Greek δεσμά desma, "bundle", and στῦλος stylos, "pillar") is an extinct order of aquatic mammals that existed from the late Oligocene (Arikareean) to the late Miocene (Tortonian) (30.8 to 7.25 million years ago).

Desmostylians are the only known extinct order of marine mammals.

Desmostylia, together with Sirenia and Proboscidea (and possibly Embrithopoda), have traditionally been assigned to the afrotherian clade Tethytheria, a group named after the paleoocean Tethys around which they originally evolved. The relationship between Desmostylia and the other orders within Tethytheria has been disputed; if the common ancestor of all tethytheres was semiaquatic, the Proboscidea became secondarily terrestrial; alternatively, Desmostylia and Sirenia could have evolved independently into aquatic mammals. The assignment of Desmostylia to Afrotheria has always been problematic from a biogeographic standpoint, given that Africa was the locus of the early evolution of Afrotheria while Desmostylia has only been found along the Pacific Rim. That assignment has been seriously undermined by a 2014 cladistic analysis that places anthracobunids and desmostylians, two major groups of putative non-African afrotheres, close to each other within the laurasiatherian order Perissodactyla. However, a posterior study shows that, while anthracobunids are definite perissodactyls, desmostylians share the same amount of characters necessary for either Paenungulata or Perissodactyla, making their former assessment as afrotheres a possibility.


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