Aphelocephala castaneiventris minilya Mathews

LeCroy, M., 2008, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 7. Passeriformes: Sylviidae, Muscicapidae, Platysteiridae, Maluridae, Acanthizidae, Monarchidae, Rhipiduridae, And Petroicidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 313 (1), pp. 1-287 : 183

Aphelocephala castaneiventris minilya Mathews

Aphelocephala castaneiventris minilya Mathews, 1920c: 75 (Minilya River, Mid-west Australia).

Now Aphelocephala leucopsis castaneiventris (Milligan, 1903) . See Mayr, 1986b: 459, and Schodde and Mason, 1999: 219–220.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 683454 , adult female, collected midway between the Minilya River and the lower Gascoyne River, Western Australia, Australia, on 15 September 1916, by Tom Carter. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Mathews gave the collecting locality as the Minilya River and 15 September 1916 as the date the type was collected, but he failed to indicate the sex of the type. There are two specimens of this species from the ‘‘Minilya River’’ that came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. The above specimen bears the correct data and is also marked ‘‘Type’’ in Mathews’ hand. It had not previously borne a type label. The paratype, a male, was collected on a date in September 1916 that is not easily read, but appears not to be 15, the day that had been entered onto the Rothschild Collection label. Mathews did not catalog any specimens as late as 1916.

Carter (1920: 685) was on the Minilya River from 30 August to 12 September. After leaving there, ‘‘when forty miles south of the Minilya, I ‘stopped off’ five days at a station owned by Mr. Harry Campbell …’’. In his notes on this species, Carter (1921: 65) said: ‘‘Several small parties of Murchison Whitefaces were seen in mid-September, 1916, in scrubby country midway between the Lower Gascoyne and Minilya rivers, where I had never previously seen any of these birds.’’ Both of these specimens were evidently obtained during the 5 days he was on H. Campbell’s station. He did not say how many specimens he obtained.