Carnivora means flesh-devourers, and its members range from mongooses to seals
Order Carnivora packs at least 293 living mammal species into the sixth-largest mammalian order, split between cat-like Feliformia and dog-like Caniformia. Latin carō plus vorāre literally means to devour flesh. Ancestors showed up in North America about six million years after the dinosaur extinction.
Carnivorans live on every major landmass, from polar cold to the Sahara's driest ground and out on the open sea, in body plans of wildly different size and shape. Feliforms include cats, civets and their kin, hyenas and mongooses, mostly confined to the Old World; only cats reached the Americas, over the Bering land bridge. Caniforms include dogs, raccoons and relatives, bears, weasels and their kin, skunks and seals, found worldwide.
The two suborders are told apart by the bony capsule around the middle ear. In feliforms it has two chambers formed by two bones joined by a partition; in caniforms it is a single bone with one chamber or a partial divide. Within the broader mammal group that also holds bats and hoofed animals, carnivorans belong to Ferae, whose closest living members besides them are pangolins.
Creodonts were once thought to be carnivorans' sister group or even ancestors because both had flesh-shearing carnassial teeth, but those teeth sit near the front of the molar row in carnivorans and near the back in creodonts, pointing to separate origins. The nearest stem relatives are small, genet-like miacoids, and the wider lineage appeared in North America's Paleocene about 60 million years ago, with true carnivorans arriving roughly 42 million years ago.
At first they stayed small and nocturnal while mesonychians and creodonts held the big-predator roles. When those groups faded at the end of the Eocene, carnivorans moved in; the nimravids became leading ambush hunters in the Oligocene, and by the Miocene most modern families dominated as large land predators in Eurasia and North America.
Source: Carnivora
