| Arctoidea Temporal range: Eocene-present |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Carnivora |
| Suborder: | Caniformia |
| Superfamily: | Arctoidea |
Arctoidea is a superfamily of extinct and extant mostly carnivorous mammals which include the extinct group Hemicyonidae (dog-bears), and extant groups Musteloidea (weasels), Nothocyon, Pinnipedia (seals, sea lions), and Ursidae (bears), found in all continents from the Eocene, 46 Ma ago, to the present, approximately 46 million years..[1]
Arctoidea was named by Flower (1869). It was reranked as the unranked clade Arctoidea by Hunt (2001), Hunt (2002) and Hunt (2002); it was reranked as the infraorder Arctoidea by Koretsky (2001), Zhai et al. (2003) and Labs Hochstein (2007). It was assigned to Carnivora by Flower (1883), Barnes (1987), Barnes (1988), Carroll (1988), Barnes (1989), Barnes (1992), Hunt (2001), Hunt (2002) and Hunt (2002); and to Caniformia by Tedford (1976), Bryant (1991), Wang and Tedford (1992), Tedford et al. (1994), Koretsky (2001), Zhai et al. (2003), Wang et al. (2005), Owen (2006), Peigné et al. (2006) and Labs Hochstein (2007).[2][3][4]
The cladogram of Arctoidea is as follows:
| Caniformia |
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