The numbat genus Myrmecobius is the sole member of the family Myrmecobiidae, one of four families that make up the order Dasyuromorphia, the Australian marsupial carnivores.[11]
The species is not closely related to other extant marsupials; the current arrangement in the order Dasyuromorphia places its monotypic family with the diverse and carnivorous species of Dasyuridae. Genetic studies have shown the ancestors of the numbat diverged from other marsupials between 32 and 42 million years ago, during the late Eocene.[12]
Two subspecies have been described, but one of these—the rusty coloured Myrmecobius fasciatus rufus Finlayson, 1933,[13][14]—has been extinct since at least the 1960s, and only the nominate subspecies (M. fasciatus fasciatus) remains alive today. The population described by Finlayson occurred in the arid central regions of South Australia, and he thought they had once extended to the coast.[13] The separation to subspecies was not recognised in the national census of Australian mammals, following W. D. L. Ride and others.[a] As its name implies, M. fasciatus rufus had a more reddish coat than the surviving population.[15] Only a very small number of fossil specimens are known, the oldest dating back to the Pleistocene, and no other species from the same family have been identified.[15]
The following is a phylogenetic tree based on mitochondrial genome sequences:[16]
| Dasyuromorphia |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
_(white_background).jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
Placement of the family within the order of dasyuromorphs may be summarised as
- Order Dasyuromorphia
- Family Thylacinidae
- Family Dasyuridae (72 species in 20 genera)
- Family Myrmecobiidae
- Genus Myrmecobius
- Species Myrmecobius fasciatus
- Genus Myrmecobius
- Family †Malleodectidae[17]
The common names are adopted from the extant names at the time of English colonisation, numbat, from the Nyungar language of southwest Australia, and walpurti, the name in the Pitjantjatjara dialect.[5] The orthography and pronunciation of the Nyungar name is regularised, following a survey of published sources and contemporary consultation that resulted in the name noombat, pronounced noom'bat.[4]
Other names include banded anteater and marsupial anteater.[18][10]
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.