Order

An order includes an assemblage of one or more related families that share a small number of broad common features — families are grouped together into an order when they show enough underlying similarity to be considered part of the same larger evolutionary and structural pattern, even though the individual families themselves may look quite different day-to-day.

The textbook's example is the order Carnivora, which brings together the family Canidae (dogs, wolves and foxes) and the family Felidae (cats, described in the previous section). Despite the obvious differences between dogs and cats, both families share the broad defining features of the order Carnivora — they are predominantly meat-eating mammals equipped with specialised carnivorous teeth (particularly enlarged, blade-like carnassial teeth adapted for shearing flesh) and clawed limbs adapted for catching and holdi …