Melithreptus whitlocki 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 : 112

Melithreptus whitlocki Mathews

Melithreptus whitlocki Mathews, 1909: 24 (Wilson’s Inlet, Western Australia).

Now Melithreptus lunatus chloropsis Gould, 1848 . See Salomonsen, 1967: 396, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 284–285, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 675.

SYNTYPE: AMNH 691459, unsexed, Wilson Inlet, 35.00S, 117.22E (USBGN, 1957), Western Australia, Australia, on 21 December 1908, by F.L. W[hitlock]. From the Mathews Collection (no. 2967) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Mathews did not designate a type or indicate how many specimens he examined. The name was published on 30 November 1909, and only one of the 24 specimens at AMNH that Whitlock collected for Mathews at Wilson Inlet was collected before that date. The specimen was entered into his catalog by Mathews as a male, but there is no indication of sex on Whitlock’s original label. This syntype had not been included in the AMNH type collection previously.

Additionally, in Mathews’ catalog at no. 2968, there is evidence that Mathews had a second specimen collected in May 1909; this has been overwritten by Mathews with a specimen collected on 14 May 1910. The day for the earlier specimen may have been 16 May 1909, and it had been cataloged as a female. That specimen, if found, is also a syntype. Mathews often considered a catalog number again available if he had traded a specimen that had been entered earlier, particularly during the period in 1909–1910 when he was switching from cataloging his entire collection systematically to cataloging and dating each new collection as he acquired it.