Small mammals such as rodents, voles, hamsters, and shrews, are related to human life in terms of pets and disease. Hence, there has been a lot of study of this group in many countries. Rodentia is the largest mammalian order, accounting for 42% of mammals in the world, and has over worldwide distribution comprising about 2,277 species (Carleton and Musser, 2005).Many local names and subspecies names have been used in the past century in Korea because many species have a wide distribution (Woon, 1967;Won, 1968;Yoon et al., 2004). Korean species of small mammals have been insufficiently described without such as keys and diagnostic description between siblings or near species in the past, but recently they are being rearranged by many studies analyzing molecular genes. Several species of Rodentia and Soricomorpha from Korea and neighboring countries were reexamined from the results of analyses using rRNA and mtDNA sequences by Koh et al. (2000Koh et al. ( , 2008aKoh et al. ( , 2008bKoh et al. ( , 2009bKoh et al. ( , 2010Koh et al. ( , 2012aKoh et al. ( , 2012bKoh et al. ( , 2013. Phylogenetic relationships of Korean Rodentia was performed by Jung et al. (2010), based on mtDNA and nuclear DNA. Additionally, taxonomic positions of several Soricidae in Korea were studied by several researchers: Ohdachi et al. (2003, 2004, 2005, 2012), Tatsuo et al. (2005), and Kartavtseva and Park (2010).The order Insectivora has been divided into several orders by phylogenetic systematics studies (Stanhope et al., 1998;Asher, 1999Asher, , 2001. The species of Insectivora in Korea belong to two orders: Erinaceomorpha, and Soricomorpha. Practically, the Insectivora are asserted to be a polyphyletic group, and the word has not been used in scholarly papers ever since Anim. Syst. Evol. Divers. Vol. 30,
ABSTRACTA taxonomic study of small mammals (Erinaceomorpha, Soricomorpha and Rodentia) was conducted in order to find out the scientific names which have been used in Korea. The synonymy of each species and taxonomical research was reviewed and confirmed in this study. The species names are rearranged based on recent studies. Among the various confused names, available names were adopted such as follows: C. shantungensis shantungensis known as Crocidura suaveolens; C. shantungensis quelpartis known as C. dsinezumi; Rattus tanezumi known as R. rattus, called black rat, roof rat and ship rat, respectively. Apodemus sylvaticus (Muridae, wood mouse) is excluded in the checklist based on indistinct previous records and ambiguous habitation on the Korean Peninsula, and neighbors. In addition, we provide a new Korean vernacular name for Myocastor coypus, called the "Nutria" in Korea. We reflect that several species are repositioned to other genera. A checklist of Korean small mammals and synonym list for each species is provided to avoid confusion of scientific names in Korea. In this study, the list of small mammals in Korea is arranged to 33 species, 20 genera, 8 families, and 3 orders.