Soricidae Fischer von Waldheim, 1817

Rainer Hutterer, 1993, Order Insectivora, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 69-130 : 80

Family Soricidae Fischer von Waldheim, 1817 . Mem. Soc. Imp. Nat. Moscow, 5:372.

SYNONYMS: Heterosoricidae .

COMMENTS: Revised by Repenning (1967) and Gureev (1971, 1979). For conflicting views of phylogeny, see Jammot (1983), George (1986), and Reumer (1987). Geological age currently believed to be Miocene, but recently the genera Cretasorex (Nesov and Gureev, 1981) from the Upper Cretaceous of Uzbekistan and Ernosorex ( Wang and Li, 1990) from the Eocene of China have been assigned to this family; while the former clearly represents a shrew the latter does not and may be a member of Plesiosoricidae . Currently accepted limits of subfamilies and tribes are very tentative. Most authors do not follow Reumer (1987) and include the extinct Heterosoricinae as a subfamily ( Engesser, 1975; Storch and Qiu, 1991), a view also accepted here. As a consequence, all living shrews as the sister group of Heterosoricidae should be classified in a single subfamily Soricinae , with Soricini and Crocidurini as tribes. However, as a convincing new phylogenetic system of fossil and living shrews has not yet been elaborated and as the application of two extant subfamilies proposed by Repenning (1967) is very much in use, it is provisionally applied here until new evidence has been presented.