Graphiurus murinus (Desmarest, 1822)

Mary Ellen Holden, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Myoxidae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 763-770 : 764

Graphiurus murinus (Desmarest, 1822) . Mammalogie, in Encyclop. Méth., 2(Suppl.):542.

TYPE LOCALITY: South Africa, Cape of Good Hope .

DISTRIBUTION: Sudan ( Setzer, 1956), Uganda ( Delany, 1975), Ethiopia ( Corbet and Yalden, 1972; Yalden et al., 1976), Kenya ( Hollister, 1919), Tanzania ( Swynnerton and Hayman, 1951), Malawi ( Ansell and Dowsett, 1988; Ansell, 1989b), Mozambique ( Smithers and Tello, 1976), E Zaire ( Rahm and Christiaensen, 1963), S Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe ( Smithers and Wilson, 1979), Botswana ( Smithers, 1971), E and N Namibia, southern Africa ( de Graaff, 1981; Roberts, 1951; Skinner and Smithers, 1990).

SYNONYMS: alticola, butteri, cineraceus, cinerascens, dasilvai, erythrobronchus, etoschae, griselda, isolatus, lalandianus, littoralis, marrensis, pretoriae, raptor, saturatus , schneideri, selindensis, soleatus, streeteri, sudanensis, tzaneenensis, vandami, vulcanicus, woosnami, zuluensis (see Allen, 1939, and Setzer, 1956, for citations).

COMMENTS: The synonyms (and therefore the distribution) listed here for G. murinus almost certainly contain names which are actually synonyms of G. microtis and other species, but pending systematic revision they cannot be confidently separated here, and are kept in their traditional listing under murinus . Meester et al. (1986) broke murinus into three subspecies: murinus , microtis and griselda. Though microtis is considered a valid species here and in Ansell (1989a, b) and Ansell and Dowsett (1988), the allocation of synonyms listed under this name in Meester et al. (1986) has yet to be documented. Three different karyotypes were found in the G. murinus group in southern Africa ( Dippenaar et al., 1983), providing another indication of the complexity of the relationships of named forms traditionally placed in this species.