Cimolesta

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Cimolesta
Fossil range: Late Cretaceous to ?Miocene

Kopidodon macrognathus

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Infraclass:	Eutheria
Superorder:	Laurasiatheria
Order:	Cimolesta McKenna, 1975

Clades

Didelphodonta
Apatotheria
Taeniodonta
Tillodonta
Pantodonta
Pantolesta
?Pholidota
?Ptolemaiidae

Cimolesta (from Greek, literally, "White Clay Thieves") is an extinct order of mammals. A few experts place the pangolins within Cimolesta, though most other experts prefer to place the pangolins within their own order, Pholidota.

Some experts place the enigmatic family Ptolemaiidae within Cimolesta, also due to similarities between dental and skull anatomies with those of Pantolesta. If the Ptolemaiids were indeed cimolestids, then the range of Cimolesta would have ranged from the Late Cretaceous to the early Miocene, when the last ptolemaiid, Kelba, disappeared in Eastern Africa.

It is part of the cohort Ferae, and is possibly a sister taxon to the Perissodactyla. The Cimolesta contains several groups that are very different from each other, and are sometimes regarded as separate orders (which makes the Cimolesta a clade between that of order and superorder): the hooved Pantodonta, the insectivorous Didelphodonta (which contains the well-known genus Cimolestes, a possible ancestor of the Carnivores) the possibly carnivorous Tillodonta, the Taeniodonta and the Apatotheria. Several groups are believed to have descended from the Cimolesta: the Pholidota (which could be regarded a suborder of Cimolesta), the Creodonta and the Carnivora. Cimolestans had a wide variety of body shapes, dentition and livestyles. The majority of them bore superficial resemblances to rodents, weasels or opossums.