Living and fossil placentals
The vast majority of living and fossil mammals are placentals. Today there are about 4,400 species, which are traditionally organised into 18 Orders, with an extra one if the Pinnipedia are separated from the Carnivora, and a twentieth if the recently extinct Malagasy order Bibymalagasia is recognised as such. There have been many attempts to discover supraordinal groupings from amongst these Orders based on morphological characters, though few proposals have been universally accepted. It is only with the advent of increasingly large sets of molecular sequence data in the last few years that a reasonably robust resolution looks imminent, although these contemporary analyses are remarkably and controversially at odds with the traditional ones. Novacek et al. (1988) summarised the then current situation regarding supraordinal classification of placentals, a time at which morphology was still dominant but molecular data was at the threshold of significance. They accepted a basal group Edentata that combined the Xenarthra of the New World with the Pholidota of the Old, based on a few cranial characters, loss of the anterior teeth, and reduction of the enamel of the remaining ones. This left the rest of the living placentals as a monophyletic group Epitheria, sharing such apparently minor characters as the shape of the stapes bone in the ear. They found very little resolution within the Epitheria, and concluded that there was a polychotomy of no less than nine lineages arranged as a ‘star’ phylogeny. No remnant of the previously recognised taxon Ferungulata, created by Simpson (1945) for the Carnivora plus the ungulate orders Artiodactyla, Perissodactyla, Proboscidea, Hyracoidea, Sirenia, and Tubulidentata remained. On the other hand, three supra ordinal taxa of earlier authors did survive. One was Gregory’s (1910) Archonta, consisting of generally conservative forms and by now composed of the Primates, Dermoptera, Scandentia, and Chiroptera, but excluding the Lipotyphla. The second was Glires, originating with Linnaeus (1758) and widely accepted ever since, for the Rodentia and Lagomorpha; Novacek et al. (1988) tentatively placed the Macroscelidea as the sister-group of the Glires. The third supraordinal taxon recognised was, like Glires, well-established if not universally accepted.