Philander canus (Osgood, 1913)

Voss, Robert S., 2022, An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (455), pp. 1-77 : 38

Philander canus (Osgood, 1913)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: FMNH 19347 , the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at Moyobamba (6.05° S, 76.97° W; ca. 860 m), San Martín department, Peru .

SYNONYMS: crucialis Thomas, 1923; mondolfii Lew et al., 2006; olrogi Flores et al., 2008.

DISTRIBUTION: As currently understood, Philander canus seems to have a disjunct distribution, with one population in Venezuela and eastern Colombia and another that extends from eastern Peru and western Brazil southward to eastern Bolivia, Paraguay, and northern Argentina (Voss et al., 2018: fig. 9).

REMARKS: Philander canus was long treated as a synonym or subspecies of P. opossum , but these taxa are not closely related according to phylogenetic analyses reported by Voss et al. (2018), who also illustrated diagnostic traits, provided a morphological description, tabulated summary statistics of measurement data, discussed synonyms, and documented sympatry with congeneric species. Despite the wide and possibly disjunct distribution of this species, Voss et al.’s (2018) analyses of mtDNA sequence data revealed little evidence of phylogeographic structure.