Arctoidea is a superfamily

Taxonomic rank

In biological classification, rank is the level in a taxonomic hierarchy. Examples of taxonomic ranks are species, genus, family, and class. Each rank subsumes under it a number of less general categories...

 of extinct and extant mostly carnivorous mammal

Mammal

Mammals are members of a class of air-breathing vertebrate animals characterised by the possession of endothermy, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands functional in mothers with young...

s which include the extinct group Hemicyonidae

Hemicyonidae

Hemicyonidae is an extinct family of so-called "dog-bears", literally "Half Dog" , bear-like carnivoran living in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia during the Oligocene through Miocene epochs 33.9—5.3 Ma, existing for approximately ....

 (dog-bears), and extant groups Musteloidea

Musteloidea

Musteloidea is a superfamily of carnivoran mammals united by shared characters of the skull and teeth. Musteloids share a common ancestor with the pinnipeds, the group which includes seals....

 (weasels), Nothocyon

Nothocyon

Nothocyon is an extinct genus of carnivoran which inhabited North America during the late Oligocene. At one time, many species of the dog family Canidae were placed in Nothocyon, but new fossils showed that the type species of Nothocyon, N. geismarianus, is more closely related to bears...

, Pinnipedia (seals, sea lions), and Ursidae (bears), found in all continents from the Eocene

Eocene

The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...

, 46 Ma ago, to the present, approximately ..

Taxonomy

Arctoidea was named by Flower (1869). It was reranked as the unranked clade Arctoidea by Hunt (2001), Hunt (2002) and Hunt (2002); it was reranked as the infraorder Arctoidea by Koretsky (2001), Zhai et al. (2003) and Labs Hochstein (2007). It was assigned to Carnivora by Flower (1883), Barnes (1987), Barnes (1988), Carroll (1988), Barnes (1989), Barnes (1992), Hunt (2001), Hunt (2002) and Hunt (2002); and to Caniformia by Tedford (1976), Bryant (1991), Wang and Tedford (1992), Tedford et al. (1994), Koretsky (2001), Zhai et al. (2003), Wang et al. (2005), Owen (2006), Peigné et al. (2006) and Labs Hochstein (2007).

Family tree

The cladogram of Arctoidea is as follows: