Deltatheroida are small therian mammals known only from the Cretaceous of Asia and North America. As fossils, they are represented mainly by isolated teeth and dentigerous jaws, though rostra, a petrosal, and the calcaneus, at least, have been described for the best known genus, Asiatic Deltatheridium (Rougier et al., 1998; Horovitz, 2000). Aside from two dubious forms: Oxlestes (Nessov, 1982) and Khuduklestes (Nessov et al., 1994), Deltatheroida are unambiguously represented by only four genera (Deltatheridium, Deltatheroides, Deltatherus, and Sulestes), all Asiatic in distribution and all placed in the family Deltatheridiidae (see Kielan-Jaworowska et al., 2004). The Asian record of Deltatheridiidae ranges from Coniacian to late Campanian. In North America, one genus, Aptian-Albian Atokatheridium, has been tentatively referred to Deltatheroida (Kielan-Jaworowska and Cifelli, 2001). Other records of the group on this continent consist of poorly represented, unnamed taxa from the Turonian (Cifelli, 1990a), late Campanian, and late Maastrichtian (Fox, 1974).
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Devis, B.M., Cifelli, R.L., Kielan-Jaworowska, Z. (2008). Earliest Evidence of Deltatheroida (Mammalia: Metatheria) from the Early Cretaceous of North America. In: Sargis, E.J., Dagosto, M. (eds) Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6997-0_1
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