Talk:Musteloidea

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how do you pronounce Musteloidea????

It breaks down syllabically as follows: mus-tel-oi-de-a. --Khajidha (talk) 20:09, 16 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Musteloids share a common ancestor with the ursoids... o[edit]

"Musteloids share a common ancestor with the ursoids, the group which includes bears." The sentence above should be rephrased, it is not very informative: You could replace the two species in the sentence with any other two random species of this planet it would still be true.130.228.251.10 (talk) 12:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A person named Hilary????[edit]

that must be a hack? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.180.173.218 (talk) 20:52, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Where does Mustelo-"idea" come from?[edit]

Should there be any information included about why it's called "weasel" superfamily? Not "raccoon" superfamily, or something? I'd guess it has something to do with probably greater number of Mustelid spiecies, but there must be better, in terms of science, explanation to that.46.211.243.209 (talk) 19:05, 23 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Without checking, the answer is probably due to when species were first described. If a species in genus Mustella is the earliest (probably going back to Linnaeus) then any family or family level rank named after Mustella takes priority. There are some quite specific rules on naming zoological taxa, sometimes rather arcane. Jts1882 | talk 19:38, 23 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The suffix "oidea" is to designate that the taxon is a superfamily. As for why it's "Musteloidea," that's because it's named after the type genus of the earliest described family, Mustelidae, which is Mustela, the weasel genus. As a rule, a superfamily or similarly ranked taxon is named either after the best known or type taxon, or is named after some designated unifying feature.--Mr Fink (talk) 19:53, 23 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]