Aim: Comprehensive, global information on species’ occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species’ only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroecology. We provide global range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal species harmonised to the taxonomy of the Mammal Diversity Database (MDD) mobilised from two sources, the Handbook of the Mammals of the World (HMW) and the Illustrated Checklist of the Mammals of the World (CMW). Location: Global. Taxon: All extant mammal species. Methods: Range maps were digitally interpreted, georeferenced, error-checked and subsequently taxonomically aligned between the HMW (6253 species), the CMW (6431 species) and the MDD taxonomies (6362 species). Results: Range maps can be evaluated and visualised in an online map browser at Map of Life ( mol.org ) and accessed for individual or batch download for non-commercial use. Main conclusion: Expert maps of species’ global distributions are limited in their spatial detail and temporal specificity, but form a useful basis for broad-scale characterizations and model-based integration with other data. We provide georeferenced range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal species as shapefiles, with species-level metadata and source information packaged together in geodatabase format. Across the three taxonomic sources our maps entail, there are 1784 taxonomic name differences compared to the maps currently available on the IUCN Red List website. The expert maps provided here are harmonised to the MDD taxonomic authority and linked to a community of online tools that will enable transparent future updates and version control.

The subfamily Rhizomyinae is known from the Late Oligocene up to the present. Today this group comprises six species, which live in southern Asia and eastern Africa. Despite the current moderate diversity of the rhizomyines, they had a greater diversification and wider distribution in the past: from Asia, their land of origin, to Africa, which they entered during the Early Miocene. So far 33 fossil species can be referred to this group. A cladistic analysis involving fossil and living species has been carried out. Prokanisamys spp. turned out to be the most basal taxa of the ingroup. This analysis calls into question the monophyly of several genera, and allows the proposal of a phylogenetic definition of the tribes Tachyoryctini and Rhizomyini. It also provides information about the origin of the African rhizomyines and allows inferring multiple dispersal phenomena from Asia to Africa in Early and Late Miocene times.