Elephant shrews, without exaggeration, can be called one of the most amazing creatures that make up the superorder Afrotheria. These small and extremely active animals lead a predominantly twilight or diurnal lifestyle, using a system of complex paths to move. All modern species of elephant shrews belong to the Macroscelididae family, in which we distinguish two branches - Rhynchocyoninae and Macroscelidinae.
It was previously believed that the rufous elephant shrew (Galegeeska rufescens), widespread in the Horn of Africa, is a representative of the genus Elephantulus, belonging to the tribe Elephantulini. However, the staff of the Laboratory of Microevolution of Mammals of the IEE RAS, together with colleagues from the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, based on the sequences of mitochondrial and nuclear genes, both new material collected by a team of authors in East Africa and available in the GenBank database, managed to show that the East African elephant shrew ( "Elephantulus" rufescens) belongs to the recently described genus Galegeeska of the tribe Macroscelidini. The multilocus phylogenetic analysis of the subfamily Macroscelidinae, carried out by the authors, confirmed the presence of two main radiations in this group, corresponding to the recently described tribes Macroscelidini and Elephantulini, and revealed a much “younger” than previously assumed age of the main diversification events within the Macroscelidea: it was shown that most modern species of this order appeared in the Plio-Pleistocene.
Krásová J., Mikula O., Šumbera R., Horáková S., Robovský J., Kostin D.S., Martynov A.A., Lavrenchenko L.A., Bryja J., 2021: The Rufous Sengi is not Elephantulus – multilocus reconstruction of evolutionary history of sengis from the subfamily Macroscelidinae. Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, 59(4): 918-932002E
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jzs.12460
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