What are Even-Toed Ungulates?
Even-toed ungulates, order Artiodactyla, is a famous mammalian order with about 220 species. It includes pigs, peccaries, camels, hippos, deer, chevrotains (mouse deer), pronghorn, giraffe, antelopes, goats, sheep, and cattle. The order includes many economically useful mammals, including pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle. Another feature unique to the even-toed ungulates is the presence of a specially-shaped bone in the ankle joints, which give these animals greater leg flexibility. The ancestry of even-toed ungulates lies in superorder Laurasiatheria, the superorder of mammals that have their origin in Laurasia, a former supercontinent that consisted of North America merged together with Eurasia. Like many other mammalian orders, they evolved in the early Eocene (around 54 million years ago). The common ancestor of living even-toed ungulates probably resembled the mouse deer of today — which oddly look like a cross between a small deer and a rodent. These animals grew from rodent-size
