Metatheria

style="background:#Template:Taxobox colour;"|Metatheria
Female Eastern Grey Kangaroo with a joey in her pouch Female Eastern Grey Kangaroo with a joey in her pouch
style="background:#Template:Taxobox colour;" | Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Subclass: Theria Infraclass: Metatheria Thomas Henry Huxley, 1880
Orders
†Deltatheroida Didelphimorphia Paucituberculata †Sparassodonta Microbiotheria Dasyuromorphia Peramelemorphia Notoryctemorphia Diprotodontia

Metatheria is a grouping within the animal class Mammalia. First proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1880, it is nearly synonymous with the earlier taxon Marsupialia (Illiger, 1811) though it is slightly wider since it also contains the nearest fossil relatives of marsupial mammals.

The earliest known representatives are from the uppermost Lower Cretaceous of North America.

The closest living relatives of the metatheres are the Eutheria (also erected by Huxley in 1880). Both are conventionally united as infraclasses within the subclass Theria (Parker and Haswell, 1897), which contains all living mammals except monotremes.

The Greek words meta- and theria mean the "changed beasts".

See also

• Marsupial

References

• McKenna MC & Bell SK, (1997), Classification of Mammals Above the Species Level. Columbia University Press.