Muskrat

Suborder

The American Society of Mammalogists Mammal Diversity Database (MDD) currently places the species within the Suborder Supramyomorpha. This designation reflects the acceptance of recent large-scale molecular phylogenetic studies that reorganized the Rodentia into three major clades. The necessity for the new suborder arose because genetic analysis showed that the classical Suborder Myomorpha, which housed the mouselike rodents, was paraphyletic—it included the common ancestor but excluded certain descendant groups (like beavers and pocket gophers). Supramyomorpha is the larger, monophyletic group that includes the traditional Myomorpha and all of its descendants. The classification system recognizing Suborder Supramyomorpha was adopted in the paper Flynn et al. (2019), with the name formally proposed by D'Elía et al. (2019). We acknowledge that many regional checklists and traditional resources continue to use the more classical and recognizable Suborder Myomorpha.