Ok but you know what's super cool that people often think are just off brand rats that are actually way cooler? Elephant shrews and hyraxes!
If you're just used to looking at the charts above, you'd probably guess that these little guys are rodents.
But when we look a little closer we notice a big difference in their teeth. Rodents have a pair of cutting teeth at the front that continuously grow, and are often reinforced with iron and have a yellowish or orangish colour because of this for example, here is a beaver skull
And hyraxes and shrews have very different teeth.
Hyraxes are mostly herbivorous, and shrews are mostly insectivorous. But they're more closely related to each other than any rodent. And those bigger sharp front teeth are a hint at a much larger relative you might be aware of. See rodents belong to rodentia, which is a part of a clade called Euarchontoglires which also includes lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) and primates (monkeys and apes like us). Which fun fact means Hyraxes and elephant shrews are more distantly related to rats than we are.
So what clade do these little guinea pig and rat like creatures belong to then?
A clade called Afrotheria, which includes some interesting members such as dugongs, aardvarks, tenrecs (hedgehog like creatures, and hedge hogs are also an entirely different thing from rodents or Afrotheria if anyone wants that tea), a funky otter like animal called the otter shrew (not a true shrew or even closely related to elephant shrews, more closely related to tenrecs), and most notably elephants and their extinct relatives.
The important thing to remember is that placental mammals came from creatures that had small furry bodies with long tails, were likely generalist omnivores (but likely largely insectivorous), nocturnal, scansorial (able to climb well), with fast, high powered metabolisms but the ability to modulate them by hibernating (that last part is a popular theory among scientists but has yet to be definitively proven). Which are all factors in how we took over the world post KPG extinction in the absence of most of the previous megafauna, especially including the nonavian dinosaurs.
So when you looks at small furry creatures we often think of rodents due to our familiarity with rats, but that's our ancestral form. Animals of that ancestral body plan still exist in most major clades, as well as branches that diverged then came back to that form because it is such a successful body plan. But that doesn't mean they're rodents! It just means rodents saw a good thing and stuck to it, while other clades branched off and filled niches as it went, becoming all sorts of interesting creatures along the way, including cats and dogs and horses and cows and sheep and hamsters and elephants.
Go back far enough we were all little squirrel like critters, so there are like critters in every major placental mammal clade, and some of them are even still extant! Such as laurasiatheria's (including cats, dogs, bears, weasles, horses, whales, deer, hippos, pigs, camels, seals, rhinos, bats, and many many more) rodent shaped families the euliptophyla (includes hedgehogs, moonrats, moles, desmans, true shrews, solenodonts etc).
Xenarthra (sloths, anteaters, armadillos) don't have extant members with that ancestral body plan, but the great american biotic interchange about 3 million years ago wiped out several Xenarthran mammal lineages (as well as many other lineages such as most phorusrachids (terror birds!), though some South American evolved animals such as giant sloths, rodents such as porcupines, and lineage of marsupials which includes the ancestors of Virginia opossums, successfully migrated North and established footholds there, though several later died out along with most of the North American evolved megafauna due to climate change at the end of the last glacial maximum, as well as potentially human predation) and replaced those niches with animals that most recently evolved in north America then diverged into those south american niches after out competing the native fauna in a rapidly changing world (a good case study on this is the south american spectacled bear and its relatives such as the giant arctodus).
Also, for reference, my guts are a disaster, since I'm sure this is definitely relevant to the topic at hand. I was literally in the ER for guts related chaos day before yesterday. It's messier than attempts to classify organisms with morphological Linnaean Taxonomy. Maybe closer to how much of a disaster phenetic taxonomy was (basically morphological numerology for the uninitiated (/humourous), though to be fair before we were able to study genomics, it was the best we had to go by, so no shade to scientists who did their best to figure out the incredibly complex world we live in with what they had available, it (along with other morphological classification systems popular at the time) just resulted in a rats nest that took the better part of a century of extensive study of genetics and the fossil record to untangle).
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