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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.
Rhinocerotidae contains five species of rhinoceroses split into four genera, Tapiridae contains four species of tapir in a single genus, and Equidae contains nine species in a single genus, including horses, donkeys, and zebras. Over 75 extinct Perissodactyla species have been discovered, though due to ongoing research and discoveries the exact ...
Horses and tapirs both evolved in North America; [31] rhinoceroses appear to have developed in Asia from tapir-like animals and then colonised the Americas during the middle Eocene (about 45 Mya). Of the approximately 15 families, only three survive (McKenna and Bell, 1997; Hooker, 2005).
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.
Rhinocerotoidea is a superfamily of perissodactyls that appeared 56 million years ago in the Paleocene.They included four extinct families, the Amynodontidae, the Hyracodontidae, the Paraceratheriidae, and the Eggysodontidae.
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 ...
] 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".