Gobiomyidae is a small
extinct
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
family of
rodents from the
Eocene of
Asia. The family contains four genera (one remains unnamed) and belongs to the superfamily
Ctenodactyloidea
Ctenodactylomorphi is an infraorder of the rodent suborder Hystricomorpha that includes two living families, the Ctenodactylidae (gundis) and the Diatomyidae (Laotian rock rat
The Laotian rock rat or ''kha-nyou'' (''Laonastes aenigmamus'', L ...
(Wang, 2001), which also contains the living
Laotian rock rat and
gundi
Gundis or comb rats (family Ctenodactylidae) are a group of small, stocky rodents found in Africa. They live in rocky deserts across the northern parts of the continent. The family comprises four living genera and five species ( Speke's gundi, ...
s and their fossil relatives (families
Diatomyidae and
Ctenodactylidae, respectively). When Wang named the family, gobiomyids were considered the closest known relatives of Ctenodactylidae, but newer research indicates that Diatomyidae is more closely related to living ctenodactylids (Dawson et al., 2006).
References
* 2006. ''Laonastes'' and the "Lazarus effect" in Recent mammals. Science, 311:1456-1458.
* 2001. Eocene ctenodactyloids (Rodentia, Mammalia) from Nei Mongol, China. Vertebrata PalAsiatica, 39(2):98-114.
Prehistoric rodent families
Eocene first appearances
Eocene extinctions
{{paleo-rodent-stub