TIL that all mammals of order Carnivora are divided into two groups: cat-like (Feliformia) and dog-like (Caniformia).

submitted by NorfolkTerrier from en.wikipedia.org

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]NorfolkTerrier[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Feliformia includes animals like cats, hyenas, and mongooses. Caniformia includes animals like dogs, bears, and raccoons. Feliforms have been more successful in the Old World, while caniforms are successful just about everywhere. Despite colloquial judgment on what might look more like a cat or a dog, a lot of the scientific difference has to do with ear bones, suggesting a split into the two clades around 42 million years ago.

For more info you can check out the pages for the two subclades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliformia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caniformia

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

To add to this, it is not uncommon (in fact kind of the rule) for clades to be differentiated on the basis of a single differing trait. Or what appears to be. After all, the split after nephrozoa between the protostomes and deuterostomes is whether the mouth or anus develop first due to different placement of cells in gastrulation (cell differentiation). Perhaps a simplistic explanation but I'm no essay writer. Phylogeny sofar as I know largely keeps subdividing along shared core ancestral divergences near as we can identify them. The specifics of course are a lot more complicated, since why the cells end up doing opposite things first is more involved.