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The mammalian order Pilosa, which includes the sloths and anteaters, includes various species from the Caribbean region. Many species of sloths are known from the Greater Antilles, all of which went extinct over the last millennia, but some sloths and anteaters survive on islands closer to the mainland. For the purposes of this article, the "Caribbean" includes all islands in the Caribbean Sea (except for small islets close to the mainland) and the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos Islands, and Barbados, which are not in the Caribbean Sea but biogeographically belong to the same Caribbean bioregion. ==Overview== Extinct sloths are known from the three Greater Antilles of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico and several smaller Antillean islands, but they are missing from the fourth of the Greater Antilles, Jamaica. These are part of the family Megalonychidae, which also includes some of the extinct giant ground sloths, such as ''Megalonyx'', and the living two-toed sloths (''Choloepus'') of the American mainland.〔White and MacPhee, 2001〕 All Greater Antillean sloths are now extinct; their extinction by ~4400 BP (uncalibrated radiocarbon date) apparently postdated the extinction of the mainland ground sloths by about six thousand years, and coincided (to within a thousand years) with the arrival of humans on the islands.〔Steadman et al., 2005〕 The extinct Caribbean sloths apparently had a wide range of locomotor habits corresponding to varying degrees of arboreality, but were generally more terrestrial than extant tree sloths.〔White, 1993〕〔Steadman et al., 2005, p. 11767〕 They had been present on the Antilles since the early Oligocene, 32 million years ago.〔White and MacPhee, 2001, p. 201〕 The subdivision of Antillean sloths into several subfamilies implies at least a diphyletic origin for them, requiring two or more separate colonization events.〔White and MacPhee, 2001, p. 227〕 In addition to the Greater Antillean sloths, some other pilosans are still extant on islands close to the Central and South American mainland. This includes several anteaters and a member of the other sloth family, that of the three-toed sloths, restricted to a small island in Panama.〔Gardner, 2005〕 The record of a tamandua from Cozumel, off Mexico, was probably in error.〔Jones and Lawlor, 1965, p. 414〕 The genera of Caribbean pilosans are classified as follows:〔Gardner, 2005; White and MacPhee, 2001, table 2〕 *Order Pilosa * *Suborder Folivora (sloths) * * *Family Bradypodidae: ''Bradypus'' * * *Family Megalonychidae * * * *Subfamily Choloepodinae * * * * *Tribe Acratocnini: ''Acratocnus'' * * * * *Tribe Cubanocnini: ''Neocnus'' * * * * *''Incertae sedis'': ''Paulocnus'' * * * *Subfamily Megalonychinae * * * * *Tribe Megalocnini: ''Megalocnus'' * * * * *Tribe Mesocnini: ''Mesocnus'' * * * *Subfamily Ortotheriinae: ''Paramiocnus'' * * * *''Incertae sedis'': ''Imagocnus'', ''Galerocnus'', several unidentified genera * *Suborder Vermilingua (anteaters) * * *Family Cyclopedidae: ''Cyclopes'' * * *Family Myrmecophagidae: ''Tamandua'' 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pilosans of the Caribbean」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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