I came across this chart on Wikipedia the other day, showing the distribution of the various orders among the 5,416 currently living and recently extinct species of mammals.

You might note that primates rank fourth among all orders of mammals. This order includes humans, other apes (yeah, I went there), gibbons, baboons, monkeys, lemurs, tarsiers, lorises, aye-ayes, etc. I’d say we’re in good company.

In substantial first place, of course, are the rodents, e.g. mice, rats, squirrels, beavers, porcupines, hamsters, guinea pigs, and capybaras.

In sizeable second place, making up nearly 1/4 of all mammal species, are the bats, e.g., uh, bats and flying foxes.

Third place threw me for a second, because I had not heard of Soricomorpha. Turns out that’s the relatively new classification for most types of shrews and moles. They used to be in a bigger order that included hedgehogs, which I remember from my nerdy childhood.

In last place, we have the single species of aardvark, a taxonomically lonely beast that is cute in its own special way. Another single-species order comes in second-to-last (really making this a tie for last place) is the monito del monte, a marsupial that looks like a mouse and lives in South America. The next-to-last few orders only have two extant species: the marsupial moles and the flying lemurs.

Anyway, I guess I’m still pretty nerdy about this stuff.

Photo credits: Aranae (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; José Luis Bartheld from Valdivia, Chile (Monito del Monte) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.