Suborder

From Palaeos

Linnaean taxonomy

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In Linnaean taxonomy, a suborder is a taxon of a rank just below an order, but higher than family or superfamily. The suborder rank is used quite often to divide large orders into more manageable chunks, for instance the division of the order Primates into the suborders Prosimii (lemurs and such) and Anthropoidea (monkeys and apes), or of the Hemiptera (bugs) into Homoptera (cicadas, aphids, etc.) and Heteroptera (true bugs).

As in both the above cases, it is not unusual for phylogenetic analysis of an order divided into two suborders to find that one of the suborders represents a derived clade, while the other represents the paraphyletic group of more plesiomorphic taxa.

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CKT061211