Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various mammals of the infraclass Eutheria, including all of the species, such as primates, carnivores, whales, ruminants, bats, and rodents, in which the female bears live young that are nourished before birth by means of a complex placenta.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to or having characters found in the Eutheria, or placental mammals.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective belonging or pertaining to the group Eutheria, comprising the mammals more closely related to animals like humans and rodents than to marsupials.
  • noun a eutherian animal.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective of or relating to or belonging to the subclass Eutheria
  • noun mammals having a placenta; all mammals except monotremes and marsupials

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From New Latin Euthēria, infraclass name : Greek eu-, eu- + Greek thēria, pl. of thērion, wild animal; see treacle.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Eutheria, from Ancient Greek εὖ (eu, "good, true") + θηρίον (thērion, "beast").

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Examples

Comments

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  • One of my best Scrabble words, built around "H-E-R". Moreover, I was playing with a group of physical anthropologists and all biology-related words got an additional 3X!

    January 2, 2009

  • Is the platypus eutherian or metatherian? Or neither? I'm very confused.

    January 28, 2009

  • Being a monotreme, it's a prototherian.

    January 28, 2009

  • The extant mammals divide into monotremes and Theria. The monotremes are the platypus and echidnas, the Theria are the rest and divide into marsupials and Eutheria, which latter is all of us (aardvarks, horses, bats, humans etc.). The terminology can be multiplied but the important thing is the bifurcating tree: monotremes plus the rest, and the rest are marsupials plus the rest, the eutherians.

    January 28, 2009