Abstract
Afrotheria is a unique and highly diverse clade of placental mammals. Their diversity is so great and morphologies so different that only by genomic analysis would one conceive phylogenetic relatedness. Once being a sequestered landmass, Africa diversified and species filled ecological niches through convergent evolution rather than gene flow: insectivores (elephant shrews, golden moles, tenrecs, and aardvarks), rodents (hyraxes), large herbivores (elephants), and aquatic mammals (manatees and dugongs).
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Freeman, K., Ben-Shlomo, G., McMullen, R., Moore, B.A. (2022). Ophthalmology of Afrotheria: Aardvarks, Hyraxes, Elephants, Manatees, and Relatives. In: Montiani-Ferreira, F., Moore, B.A., Ben-Shlomo, G. (eds) Wild and Exotic Animal Ophthalmology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81273-7_5
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