Elephant And Relative Families

This group gathers taxon/Mammal Families subcategory members that are themselves mammal families belonging to the elephants and their closer surviving relatives, a set of mammal lineages, Proboscidea, Sirenia and Hyracoidea among them, that molecular evidence places closer to one another than to most other placental mammal groups despite very different modern body plans. It spans Elephantidae, the elephant family, the only family of a once far more diverse order that also included mammoths and mastodons, Procaviidae, the hyrax family, small, rabbit-sized relatives that look nothing like an elephant at first glance, and Dugongidae and Trichechidae, the dugong and manatee families, fully aquatic herbivorous relatives collectively called sirenians. Every family gathered here traces back to a common ancestral radiation now generally reconstructed as having originated in Africa, a continent where elephants, hyraxes and dugongs still overlap in range today.