Talk:Muroidea

Comments
Big edit here. I'll do my best to do this all correctly. Everything historically relating to the article for the family Muridae was actually referring to the superfamily Muroidea. Many authors have treated them as synonyms in the past mostly as a convenience. It was incredibly difficult to determine how they are related based strictly on physical characteristics, but most proponents of putting all muroids in a single family agreed that the diversity warranted treating them as several families. They just couldn't determine how to split those families. The most current literature based on genetic work (i.e. Adkins and Steppan in a 2004 Systematic Biology article) splits the Muroidea into several families. So whatever used to be relating to the article Muridae is now under Muroidea, and Muridae is restricted to the subfamilies Murinae, Deomyinae, Lophiomyinae, and Gerbillinae. Aranae 3 December 2004.


 * There are more dan 1500 spp. and probably many more, I believe, however, that's not the most important thing.
 * I think it might be a good idea to make a taxonomic list (such as at nl:Muridae (taxonomie)) (I'll soon make it nl:Muroidea (taxonomie). You may copy and paste it from there, although a few changes are already necessary. I've also made a few pages about sigmodontines (from nl:Sigmodontinae to the tribes and genera). The pages about muroids are very good, I think. Ucucha 19:17, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Taxonomy
Please. check Wilson and Reeder, 1993, Mammals species of the world (Smithsonian, also in web), for the present taxonomy of Rodentia. (From User:84.230.204.158 on 4 May 2005) - comment moved from article page.


 * Musser and Carleton (1993; muroid chapter in Wilson and Reeder) use a much older taxonomy that incorporates almost none of the extensive molecular work that was conducted in late 1990s and early 2000s. Steppan et al. (2004) propose a taxonomy based on a host of genes and consistent among many studies.  There is little doubt that the new Mammal Species of the World which is in press now bears much closer resemblance to Steppand et al. (2004) than to Musser and Carleton (1993).  --Aranae 21:20, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

It ain't clear from this article what distinguishes Muroidea from other rodents. I find this deficiency quite often in biotaxonomy articles, so there is a job for someone who knows about these things. --212.56.114.4 22:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Please see [ITIS taxonomy] to correct this page. --83.199.108.96 14:03, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
 * ITIS is woefully outdated. It's based on Musser and Carleton (1993).  Musser and Carleton (2006) incorporate much up to date information including molecular results.  --Aranae 21:39, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Superfamilies
"Superfamily" goes straight to Taxonomic Ranks. Perhaps a way to ease into creating that article would be to just list species that contain what are termed as "superfamilies." Maybe direct it to a page that lists some of these others?