Ruminantia

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Ruminantia
Temporal range: 49–0Ma
Late Eocene - Recent
White-tailed Deer
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Suborder: Cetruminantia
(Unranked)Ruminantiamorpha[1]
(Unranked)Ruminantia
Families

Ruminantia includes many of the well-known large grazing or browsing mammals: among them cattle, goats, sheep, deer, and antelope. All members of the Ruminantia are ruminants: they digest food in two steps, chewing and swallowing in the normal way to begin with, and then regurgitating the semi-digested cud to re-chew it and thus extract the maximum possible food value.

Not all ruminants belong to the Ruminantia.[2] Camels and llamas are among the exceptions, a suborder known as Tylopoda.[2] Also, there are a number of other large grazing mammals that, while not strictly ruminants, have similar adaptations for surviving on large quantities of low-grade food. Kangaroos and horses are examples.

Evolution

Ruminantiamorpha is a total clade of artiodactyls defined, according to Spaulding et al., as "Ruminantia plus all extinct taxa more closely related to extant members of Ruminantia than to any other living species."[1] Spaulding grouped some genera of the family Anthracotheriidae as within Ruminantiamorpha but not Ruminantia, but placed other anthracotheres within Ruminantiamorpha's sister clade, Cetancodontamorpha.

The Tragulidae are the basal family in the Ruminantia.[3]

The ancestral Ruminantia karyotype is 2n = 48 similar to that of cetartiodactyls.[3]

   Cetartiodactyla   

 Tylopoda


   Artiofabula   

 Suina    


   Cetruminantia   

 Ruminantia


   Whippomorpha   

 Hippopotamidae



 Cetacea






References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Relationships of Cetacea (Artiodactyla) among mammals: increased taxon sampling alters interpretations of key fossils and character evolution". PLoS ONE 4 (9): e7062. 2009. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007062. PMC 2740860. PMID 19774069. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 Whistler, D. P. and S. D. Webb. 2005. New goatlike camelid from the late Pliocene of Tecopa Lake Basin, California. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Contributions in Science 503:1-40.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Kulemzina AI, Yang F, Trifonov VA, Ryder OA, Ferguson-Smith MA, Graphodatsky AS (2011) Chromosome painting in Tragulidae facilitates the reconstruction of Ruminantia ancestral karyotype. Chromosome Res.
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