Phocinae (known colloquially as "Northern seals") is a subfamily of Phocidae whose distribution is found in the seas surrounding the

Holarctic The Holarctic realm is a biogeographic realm that comprises the majority of habitats found throughout the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. It corresponds to the floristic Boreal Kingdom. It includes both the Nearctic zoogeographical reg ...

, with the

Baikal seal The Baikal seal, Lake Baikal seal or (''Pusa sibirica''), is a species of earless seal endemic to Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. Like the Caspian seal, it is related to the Arctic ringed seal. The Baikal seal is one of the smallest true seal ...

(''Pusa sibirica'') being the world's only freshwater species of

pinniped Pinnipeds (pronounced ), commonly known as seals, are a widely range (biology), distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammal, marine mammals. They comprise the extant taxon, extant family (biology ...

. What distinguishes them from other phocid seals is the presence of well-developed claws on their front and back flippers. The Phocinae is divided into three extant

tribe The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in part due to confli ...

s: Erignathini (represented by the sole extant Bearded seal ''Erignathus barbatus''), Cystophorini (another extant monotypic tribe represented by

Hooded seal The hooded seal (''Cystophora cristata'') is a large phocid found only in the central and western North Atlantic, ranging from Svalbard in the east to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the west. The seals are typically silver-grey or white in color, w ...

''Cystophora cristata''), and Phocini (represented by the rest of the other surviving species in the subfamily). Members of both Erignathini and Cystophorini have 34 chromosomes, while species in the tribe Phocini have 32 chromosomes. Below is a composite phylogeny of the phocine genera after Berta & Churchill (2012), Dewaele et al. (2018),Leonard Dewaele; Olivier Lambert; Stephen Louwye (2018). "A critical revision of the fossil record, stratigraphy and diversity of the Neogene seal genus Monotherium (Carnivora, Phocidae)". Royal Society Open Science. 5 (5): 171669. doi:10.1098/rsos.171669. and Koretsky & Rahmat (2020) (which is an update of their previous phylogenetic analysis in 2013):

References

Pinnipeds Taxa named by John Edward Gray Mammal subfamilies {{carnivora-stub