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Eutheria (from Greek εὐ-, eú-'good, right' and θηρίον, thēríon 'beast'; lit. ' true beasts '), also called Pan-Placentalia, is the clade consisting of placentals and all therian mammals that are more closely related to placentals than to marsupials.
The class Mammalia is divided into two subclasses based on reproductive techniques: egg-laying mammals (yinotherians or monotremes - see also Australosphenida), and mammals which give live birth ().
Herbivory is of extreme ecological importance and prevalence among insects.Perhaps one third (or 500,000) of all described species are herbivores. [4] Herbivorous insects are by far the most important animal pollinators, and constitute significant prey items for predatory animals, as well as acting as major parasites and predators of plants; parasitic species often induce the formation of galls.
Various carnivorans, with feliforms to the left, and caniforms to the right. Carnivora is an order of placental mammals that have specialized in primarily eating flesh. Members of this order are called carnivorans, or colloquially carnivores, though the term more properly refers to any meat-eating organisms, and some carnivoran species are omnivores or herbivores.
Figure 1:In mammals, the quadrate and articular bones are small and part of the middle ear; the lower jaw consists only of dentary bone.. While living mammal species can be identified by the presence of milk-producing mammary glands in the females, other features are required when classifying fossils, because mammary glands and other soft-tissue features are not visible in fossils.
Unrelated herbivores and carnivores have adapted to marine and freshwater environments. [5] The flipper forelimbs of marine mammals (cetaceans, pinnipeds, and sirenians) are a classic example of convergent evolution. There is widespread convergence at the gene level. [6]
A study on eutherian diversity suggests that placental diversity was constrained during the Paleocene, while multituberculate mammals diversified; afterwards, multituberculates decline and placentals explode in diversity.
In the simplest scheme, the first trophic level (level 1) is plants, then herbivores (level 2), and then carnivores (level 3). The trophic level equals one more than the chain length, which is the number of links connecting to the base. The base of the food chain (primary producers or detritivores) is set at zero.