Dunnart

Dunnart
White-footed dunnart
(Sminthopsis leucopus)
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Infraclass: Marsupialia
Order: Dasyuromorphia
Family: Dasyuridae
Subfamily: Sminthopsinae
Tribe: Sminthopsini
Genus: Sminthopsis
Thomas, 1887
Type species
Phascogale crassicaudata
Gould, 1844
Species

23, see text

A dunnart is a small marsupial with narrow feet, about the size of a European mouse. It belongs to the group called Sminthopsis. Dunnarts mostly eat insects. The word comes from the Noongar (Indigneous Australian) word donat)

Scientific Classification

Fat-tailed dunnart in its natural habitat.

The group name Sminthopsis was given by Oldfield Thomas in 1887. Before that, the name Podabrus was used, but it was already taken by a group of beetles. The type species in this group is Phascogale crassicaudata, named by John Gould in 1844.

There are 19 different species of dunnarts, and they all live in Australia or New Guinea. all of them in Australia or New Guinea:

There are also two species are recognized by the American Society of Mammalogists:

The American Society of Mammalogists also lists S. griseoventer as a synonym of S. fuliginosa, and moved S. longicaudata to the genus Antechinomys.

Description

A male dunnart's Y chromosome is the smallest mammal Y chromosome.

Notes

  1. ↑ The list is based on the Third edition of Wilson & Reeder's Mammal Species of the World (2005) except where both the Mammal Diversity Database and IUCN agree on the change.

References

  1. ↑ Abbott, Ian (2001). "Aboriginal names of mammal species in south-west Western Australia" (PDF). CALMScience. 3 (4): 450–451.
  2. ↑ Divljan, Anja; Ingleby, Sandy; Parnaby, Harry (6 January 2015). "Taxonomic status of Podabrus albocaudatus Krefft, 1872 and declaration of Sminthopsis granulipes Troughton, 1932 (Marsupialia: Dasyuridae) as a protected name for the White-tailed Dunnart from Western Australia". Zootaxa. 3904 (2): 283–292. doi:10.11646/zootaxa.3904.2.7. ISSN 1175-5334. PMID 25660785. S2CID 30027103.
  3. ↑ "Sminthopsis longicaudata". WA Museum Collections. 2017-02-14. Retrieved 2020-12-24.
  4. ↑ Toder R.; Wakefield M.J.; Graves J.A.M. (2000). "The minimal mammalian Y chromosome - the marsupial Y as a model system". Cytogenet Cell Genet. 91 (1–4): 285–92. doi:10.1159/000056858. PMID 11173870. S2CID 30401023.

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