Forelimb anatomy of the aardvark, Orycteropus afer (Mammalia, Tubulidentata)

Abstract

Soft tissue anatomy, especially myology, has been largely neglected by systematic biologists reconstructing the phylogeny of Mammalia. This is due to inadequate description and illustration of structures in many mammalian orders, and conflicting or inaccurate terminology in the existing descriptions. While anatomical terminology has been standardized for the domestic animals and their myology is well known, many rare mammals have not been dissected in decades and the available descriptions lack standardization and often compare taxa now known to be genetically unrelated. This leaves systematic biologists unable to verify muscle character states in the exotic mammals whose evolutionary relationships are most controversial. For example, little morphological evidence has been found to support the clade Afrotheria, which unites several mammalian orders thought to be unrelated until the advent of genetic sequencing.Here I present the forelimb anatomy of the aardvark, Orycteropus afer, the one living member of the order Tubulidentata and a member of the clade Afrotheria, based on my dissections of two alcohol‐preserved museum specimens. These dissections are part of a dissertation project to document the limb anatomy of several mammalian orders, particularly the little known smaller afrotheres, for use in systematics research. This research was supported by the Field Museum of Natural History Visiting Scholar Fund.Grant Funding SourceNational Science Foundation