Deltatheroida
Sign in to saveDeltatheroida is an extinct group of basal metatherians that were distantly related to modern marsupials. The majority of known members of the group lived in the Cretaceous; one species, Gurbanodelta kara, is known from the late Paleocene (Gashatan) of China. Their fossils are restricted to Central Asia and North America. This order can be defined as all metatherians closer to Deltatheridium than to Marsupialia.
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Vinony's link graph records 96 inbound references to Deltatheroida, and connects out to Metatheria, Sparassodonta and Asiatherium.
It is catalogued under topics including Aptian first appearances, Mammal orders and Paleocene extinctions.
Vinony links it to 6 Wikipedia language editions.
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Deltatheroida is an extinct group of basal metatherians that were distantly related to modern marsupials. The majority of known members of the group lived in the Cretaceous; one species, Gurbanodelta kara, is known from the late Paleocene (Gashatan) of China. Their fossils are restricted to Central Asia and North America. This order can be defined as all metatherians closer to Deltatheridium than to Marsupialia.
When they were first identified in the 1920s, they were believed to be placentals and possible ancestors of the "creodonts" (a polyphyletic group of extinct carnivorous mammals from the Paleogene and Miocene), but this was later disproven. Nonetheless, deltatheroideans do converge on hyaenodontids, oxyaenids, carnivorans, dasyuromorphs, thylacoleonids and sparassodonts in many details of their dental anatomy, suggesting a carnivorous lifestyle.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Deltatheroida” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.