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Rhinos and tapirs are more closely related to each other than to horses. The separation of horses from other perissodactyls took place according to molecular genetic analysis in the Paleocene some 56 million years ago, while the rhinos and tapirs split off in the lower-middle Eocene, about 47 million years ago.
Brontotheriidae is a family of extinct mammals belonging to the order Perissodactyla, the order that includes horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs.Superficially, they looked rather like rhinos with some developing bony nose horns, and were some of the earliest mammals to have evolved large body sizes of several tonnes.
Three perissodactyl species (clockwise from left): plains zebra (Equus quagga), Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) and South American tapir (Tapirus terrestris) Perissodactyla is an order of placental mammals composed of odd-toed ungulates – hooved animals which bear weight on one or three of their five toes with the other toes either ...
] Outside strict biological classification, the related term pachyderm is commonly used to describe elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and tapirs. Cuvier himself defined Pachydermata as "animals with hoofs, non ruminants", whereas Storr had described it as "mammals with hoofs with more than two toes".
Rhinoceros horns, unlike those of other horned mammals, consist only of keratin. These horns rest on the nasal ridge of the animal's skull. Antlers are unique to cervids and found mostly on males: the only cervid females with antlers are caribou and reindeer , whose antlers are normally smaller than males'.
Heralded as the world's largest rodents, the South American rainforest natives can actually weigh as much as a full grown man.. But despite the fact that they apparently like to eat their own dung ...
In 1948, Russian palaeontologist Valentin Teryaev suggested it was semi-aquatic with a dome-like horn, and resembled a hippo because the animal had four toes like a wetland tapir rather than the three toes in other rhinos, but Elasmotherium has since been shown to have had only three functional toes, [6] and Teryaev's reconstruction has not ...
Palorchestes, a genus of the extinct marsupial family Palorchestidae, which are closely related to wombats and koalas in the suborder Vombatiformes, was nicknamed the "marsupial tapir" due to the shape of the animal's nasal bones, which was presumed that they possessed a short proboscis, [63] like those of placental tapirs today.