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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2017
The placental or eutherian mammals comprise about twenty living orders and several extinct ones. The morphological and adaptive range of this group is extraordinary; diversification has produced lineages as varied as humans and their primate relatives, flying bats, swimming whales, ant-eating anteaters, pangolins and aardvarks, a baroque extravagance of horned, antlered, and trunk-nosed herbivores (ungulates), as well as the supremely diverse rats, mice, beavers and porcupines of the order Rodentia. Such adaptive diversity, and the emergence of thousands of living and fossil species, apparently resulted from a radiation beginning in the late Mesozoic between 65 and 80 million years ago (Novacek, 1990). This explosive radiation (Figure 1) is one of the more intriguing chapters of vertebrate history, and the problem has attracted interest from unusually varied perspectives. As a result, eutherian mammals are known from a rapidly growing molecular database, as well as a wealth of morphological characters and a comparatively enriched fossil record. The interplay of molecular and morphological investigation is more apparent in the case of placental mammals that in any other vertebrates, perhaps more than in any other group of organisms.