Order Erinaceomorpha
Author
Wilson, Don E.
Author
Reeder, DeeAnn
text
2005
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
Mammal Species of the World: a Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (3 rd Edition), Volume 1
212
219
book chapter
0-8018-8221-4
10.5281/zenodo.7316519
Erinaceomorpha Gregory 1910
Families:
1 family with 10 genera and 24 species:
Family
Erinaceidae G. Fischer 1814
(10 genera with 24 species and 37 subspecies)
Discussion:
Formerly included in the Insectivora (as in the last edition;
Hutterer, 1993
a
) or Lipotyphla, but treated here as a separate order in consequence of the obvious paraphyletic nature of the Insectivora clade (
Asher et al., 2002
;
Stanhope et al., 1998
). Various genetic studies (
Emerson et al., 1999
;
Liu et al., 2001
;
Mouchaty et al., 2000
a
,
b
; Nikaido et al., 2001) demonstrated that hedgehogs and soricomorphs keep distant positions in phylogenetic trees. Such results reflect ideas earlier expressed by paleontologists (
Butler, 1988
;
McKenna, 1975
) and are corroborated by a careful study of the morphology and relationships of fossil and extant zalambdodont mammals by
Asher et al. (2002)
. The name
Erinaceomorpha
was proposed by
Gregory (1910)
and has since been widely used in the paleontological literature. It is adopted here in the sense of
McKenna (1975)
and
Butler (1988)
.
MacPhee and Novacek (1993)
used it as a name for a suborder of Lipotyphla of unresolved relationships to other clades such as soricomorphs and chrysochloromorphs.