Myzantha obscura perplexa Mathews

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 162

Myzantha obscura perplexa Mathews

Myzantha obscura perplexa Mathews, 1925a: 50 (Linga, Victoria).

Now Manorina flavigula melanotis ( Wilson, 1911) . See Salomonsen, 1967: 443, Schodde and

Mason, 1999: 269–273, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 617.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 694540 , female, collected at Linga , 35.10S, 141.42E ( USBGN, 1957), Victoria, Australia, on 15 September 1916, by Thomas Tregellas. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Mathews said that his type, collected at Linga by Tregellas on 15 September 1916, was in his collection in the Rothschild Collection, indicating that by 1925 Rothschild had already bought the Mathews Collection. There is only one specimen collected on that date that came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. There are two additional specimens collected by Tregellas at Linga on 21 September 1916, but because they both have yellow on the sides of the neck and a yellow-green forehead, I do not condsider them paratypes, as Mathews specifically said that perplexa lacked these two characters. The holotype bears a Mathews Collection label, filled in by Tregellas, a Rothschild Museum label printed ‘‘Ex. coll. G.M. Mathews,’’ and an AMNH type label filled in by Charles Vaurie, probably when Salomonsen was working on Meliphagidae at AMNH.

Higgins et al. (2008: 617) treated M. melanotis as a monotypic species, citing mitochondrial DNA studies, but after careful analysis of populations and introgression among them, Schodde and Mason (1999: 269–273) suggested retaining melanotis as a subspecies of Manorina flavigula . More research seems indicated.

See Joseph and Wilke (2007) for a comparison of apparent Pleistocene population expansion and mitochondrial DNA diversity in Acanthagenys rufogularis .