Word.ws English Dictionary

tupaiid

tupaiid noun: any of the family Tupaiidae of tree shrews.

tupaiid: any of the family Tupaiidae of tree shrews
Image: Stavenn, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

tupaiid (plural tupaiids)

  1. Any of the family Tupaiidae of tree shrews.
    • Some authors rank tupaiids in a separate order Tupaioidea (Martin, 1966), while others retain them among the Primates (Napier and Napier, 1967) or 1nsectivora (Hill, 1953b).
      The uncertainty surrounding tupaiid phylogeny is a consequence of an inadequate fossil record.1987, F. A. Jenkins, Jr., “1: Tree Shrew Locomotion and the Origins of Primate Arborealism”, in John G. Fleagle, editor, Primate Evolution and Human Origins, page 2
    • Dental characters have proven to be of little use as there is no Paleocene tree shrew, which would show more primitive tupaiid dental characters. From the dentition of living tupaiids, one would easily infer that all of them have derived characters that prevent them from being ancestral to...2007, Marc Godinot, “Chapter 4: Primate Origins: A Reappraisal of Historical Data Favoring Tupaiid Affinities”, in Matthew J. Ravosa, Marian Dagosto, editors, Primate Origins: Adaptations and...

Examples of tupaiid in a sentence

  • Dental characters have proven to be of little use as there is no Paleocene tree shrew, which would show more primitive tupaiid dental characters.2007, Marc Godinot, “Chapter 4: Primate Origins: A Reappraisal of Historical Data Favoring Tupaiid Affinities”, in Matthew J. Ravosa...
  • Tupaiids have had a confused taxonomic history—at various times being placed in the Orders Primates and Insectivora, and currently within their own order, Scandentia.2007, George A. Feldhamer, Lee C. Drickamer, Stephen H. Vessey, Joseph F. Merritt, Carey Krajewski, Mammalogy: Adaptation, Diversity...

Forms of tupaiid

pluraltupaiids

Questions about tupaiid

What does tupaiid mean?
Tupaiid means any of the family Tupaiidae of tree shrews.
How do you use tupaiid in a sentence?
Dental characters have proven to be of little use as there is no Paleocene tree shrew, which would show more primitive tupaiid dental characters.
What part of speech is tupaiid?
Tupaiid is a noun.
What is the plural of tupaiid?
The plural of tupaiid is tupaiids.

Words near tupaiid in the dictionary

  1. Tuolumne City
  2. Tuolumne County
  3. Tuotomb
  4. tup
  5. Tupa
  6. tupaiid
  7. tupaiids
  8. tupakihi
  9. Tupamaro
  10. Tupamaros
  11. tupan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tupaiid (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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