Subfamily Dendromurinae Alston, 1876 . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1876:82.

SYNONYMS: Deomyinae, Dendromyinae.

COMMENTS: Carleton and Musser (1984) provided diagnosis of the subfamily, general characters, habits, habitats, and other information; summarized historical judgments about relationships of the group, which by 1984 had disassociated dendromurines from murines and either aligned them to "cricetids" or treated them as a separate family (Chaline et al., 1977); and cautioned that more research was required to determine if the dendromurines as currently defined are a natural group or instead a polyphyletic assemblage of specialized relicts evolved from a primitive African muroid stock. The association of dendromurines as a subfamily of Cricetidae was retained by Lindsay (1988).

Extant members of Dendromurinae are found only in Subsaharan Africa (Dieterlen, 1971), and the group is represented in parts of that region by Pleistocene, Pliocene, and Miocene fossils (Carleton and Musser, 1984; Conroy et al., 1992; Lavocat, 1978; Senut et al., 1992), and in North Africa by Miocene samples (Lindsay, 1988). But at one time the geographic range of dendromurines extended beyond Africa: examples of Dendromus are recorded from the late Miocene deposits of S Spain, and extinct genera mark the first appearance of dendromurines in the middle Miocene of Pakistan and Thailand (Lindsay, 1988, and references therein).