Dendromurinae Alston, 1876

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 541

Subfamily Dendromurinae Alston, 1876 . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1876:82.

SYNONYMS: Deomyinae, Dendromyinae.

COMMENTS: Carleton and Musser (1984) provided diagnosis of the subfamily, general characters, habits, habitats, and other information; summarized historical judgments about relationships of the group, which by 1984 had disassociated dendromurines from murines and either aligned them to "cricetids" or treated them as a separate family ( Chaline et al., 1977); and cautioned that more research was required to determine if the dendromurines as currently defined are a natural group or instead a polyphyletic assemblage of specialized relicts evolved from a primitive African muroid stock. The association of dendromurines as a subfamily of Cricetidae was retained by Lindsay (1988).

Extant members of Dendromurinae are found only in Subsaharan Africa ( Dieterlen, 1971), and the group is represented in parts of that region by Pleistocene, Pliocene, and Miocene fossils ( Carleton and Musser, 1984; Conroy et al., 1992; Lavocat, 1978; Senut et al., 1992), and in North Africa by Miocene samples ( Lindsay, 1988). But at one time the geographic range of dendromurines extended beyond Africa: examples of Dendromus are recorded from the late Miocene deposits of S Spain, and extinct genera mark the first appearance of dendromurines in the middle Miocene of Pakistan and Thailand ( Lindsay, 1988, and references therein).