The specialized body forms of other kinds of rodents tie them closer to particular locomotor patterns
and ecologies. Some strictly arboreal species have a prehensile tail; others glide from tree to tree
supported by fur-covered membranes between appendages (see flying squirrel and anomalure).
Highly specialized fossorial (burrowing) rodents, including blind mole rats, blesmols, and ground
squirrels, are cylindrical and furry with protruding, strong incisors, small eyes and ears, and large
forefeet bearing powerful digging claws. Semiaquatic rodents such as beavers, muskrats, nutrias,
and water rats possess specialized traits allowing them to forage in aquatic habitats yet den in
ground burrows. Terrestrial leaping species, such as kangaroo rats, jumping mice, gerbils,
and jerboas, have short forelimbs, long and powerful hind limbs and feet, and a long tail used for
balance. Body forms of some rodents converge on those in nonrodent orders,
resembling shrews, moles, hares, pikas, pigs, or small forest deer. There is also convergence between
distantly related groups of rodents in particular body forms and associated natural histories.
Key People:
Charles Elton
Related Topics:
Sciuromorpha
Hystricognatha
Sciuravida
rat
Anomaluromorpha
On the Web:
Cell Press - Current Biology - Rodents (Nov. 27, 2025)
Regardless of body form, all rodents share the same basic tools that, as mammologists Emmons and
Feer noted, “can be used to cut, pry, slice, gouge, dig, stab, or delicately hold like a pair of tweezers;
they can cut grass, open nuts, kill animal prey, dig tunnels and fell large trees.”
Evolution and classification
As documented by fossils, the evolutionary history of rodents extends back 56 million years to the
Late Paleocene Epoch in North America. Those species, however, are considered to have originated
in Eurasia, so the origin of the order Rodentia is certainly older. However, lack of fossil evidence prior
to the Late Paleocene makes the understanding of evolutionary relationships between rodents above
the familial level a continuing quest. Specialists agree with the definitions of most families, but they
historically have disagreed, and still do, about the arrangement of families into larger groups—
namely, suborders. Past classifications either have omitted suborders altogether and grouped the
families into superfamilies or have grouped the families into 2, 7, 11, or 16 suborders. The outline
below follows the latest formal classification, which employs five suborders, and is based upon a
combination of the classical arrangements of the jaw and associated musculature, histologic
structure of incisor enamel layers, comparative anatomy of the head and postcranial skeletons and
different organ systems, embryonic development of extraembryonic fetal membranes, and analyses
of DNA. Some specialists recognize just two suborders, Sciurognathi and Hystricognathi, which were
proposed in 1899 and were based on conformation of the lower jaw. But any arrangement is simply
a hypothesis of relationships between rodent families that is continually being tested by discovery of
new fossils, reanalyses of data from conventional sources, and new analyses of data from many
different, unrelated sources.
