Résumé
Artiodactyls are a very diverse group of mammals. Their incredible evolutionary success makes them the most abundant group of ungulates on the planet today. Their current familial diversity even places them second behind rodents and third in terms of generic and specific diversity. The modern representatives of the group have very different ecologies and diets, from herbivorous to omnivorous, and even piscivorous, and consequently exhibit highly diverse dental morphologies. The phylogenetic relationships of the clade are overall well resolved from molecular data but remain highly problematic when past diversity is considered, as evidenced by the lack of consensus for the position of fossil taxa. Dental characters remain widely used in morphological analyses, for obvious reasons of conservation bias and overrepresentation of dental material in paleontological collections. However, these characters mainly concern the cheek dentition whereas the anterior dentition is generally only little considered in large-scale analyses. This work therefore undertakes the comparison of anterior teeth (canine and incisors) at the scale of Artiodactyla, which include the modern and extinct clades: Suoidea, Cetacea, Hippopotamoidea, Tylopoda, Ruminantia, Cainotherioidea, Entelodontidae, Anoplotherioidea, Xiphodontidae, Amphimerycidae, Mericoidodontoidea, and Dichobunoidea. Incisor morphology supports the major clades Cainotheriidae, Anoplotheriidae, Ruminantia, Suina, and Cetancodonta. Our results also indicate a basal position of Cetacea + Raoellidae, challenging the findings of molecular phylogenies. We show that Artiodactyla have a significant morphological disparity in their anterior dentition, which provides a promising new source of relevant phylogenetic characters.