Acrobatidae

Family ACROBATIDAE (Strahan, 1987) Diagnosis. The diagnosis provided by Aplin, in Aplin and Archer (1987) remains fully applicable. Remarks. The authorship of Family Acrobatidae has been attributed erroneously in recent works as Aplin & Archer (1987) or Aplin, in Aplin & Archer (1987), e.g., Flannery (1994); Jackson & Thorington (2012). Family Acrobatidae was proposed by Aplin (in Aplin & Archer 1987) but the publication of this work post-dates Strahan’s (1987) usage of the name which was published earlier in that year. Strahan unambiguously proposed Family Acrobatidae as new, accompanied by a diagnosis: “The family is distinguished from the other phalangeroids by the feather-like tail”. Although a type genus was not explicitly stated, this did not become a formal requirement under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature until after 1999. Aplin (in Aplin & Archer 1987) provided a more detailed diagnosis and a discussion of the possible phylogenetic affinities of the group. Beck et al. (2022: 241) provided a more detailed diagnosis based on craniodental apomorphies. Phylogenetic analyses of mitogenomes and genome scale nuclear gene datasets support a sister relationship of acrobatids with a clade comprising, Petauridae, Pseudocheiridae and Tarsipedidae (Mitchell et al. 2014; Duchene et al. 2018).