https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0960-9822%2822%2900223-8

Elephants and sea cows and tenrecs; hyraxes and aardvarks and sengis and
golden
moles. What do these very divergent and different looking mammals have in
common? They are each other’s closest living relatives, and all belong to the
placental mammal clade Afrotheria (‘African beasts’), which is one of the
four major
clades of placental mammals along with Xenarthra (anteaters, sloths,
armadillos), Euarchontoglires (e.g. rodents, rabbits, primates), and
Laurasiatheria (e.g. bats,
carnivorans, odd-toed and even-toed ungulates) (Figure 1). Unlike many animal
groups that were recognized and named long ago based on anatomical features,
the Afrotheria emerged as a natural clade only in the 1990s when molecular
techniques were applied to the problem of placental mammal classification.
The
recognition of Afrotheria represents a triumph of molecular phylogenetics and
brings together a fantastically diverse assemblage of placental mammals with
widely disparate ecological and morphological adaptations. Although
Afrotheria
was not previously proposed based on studies of anatomical characters,
additional support for the monophyly of this clade comes from geography and
the fossil record. Specifically, the six extant orders in Afrotheria share
with each
other early fossil representatives that are known from Africa or along the
margins of the ancient Tethys Sea, hence Afrotheria.