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Golden moles(family Chrysochloridae)belong to an ancient Afrotheria clade of placental mammals and represent one of Africas most enigmatic,elusive and endangered mammals.Ten of the 21 described species are threatened(IUCN 2014),yet morphological,cytogenetic and molecular delineations of several taxa and their evolutionary relationships remain unclear.A sound taxonomy forms an essential baseline for effective conservation planning and in this context,parsimony and model-based maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods and diverse data treatments were used to infer a well-resolved phylogeny for the Chrysochloridae from molecular(five genes)and multistate morphological and cytogenetic(32)characters.We present a revised taxonomic classification for the Chrysochloridae,as the inferred relationships revealed highly divergent lineages within a number of genera and species as well as contradicting evolutionary trends in certain morphological characters suggesting convergent evolution and homoplasy.The conservation implications of the phylogeny and some novel insights into intra-specific relationships of the highly threatened and range-restricted Neamblysomus julianae and the widespread Amblysomus hottentotus are discussed.Due to the novelty of this mammalian family and the insights it can offer into the radiation of an old but range-restricted clade across the African continent,Bayesian relaxed-clock molecular dating was used to tentatively place their diversification within a temporal and biogeographic framework.