Petromyscus collinus (Thomas and Hinton, 1925)

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 683

Petromyscus collinus (Thomas and Hinton, 1925) . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1925:237.

TYPE LOCALITY: Namibia, Damaraland, Karibib, northwest of Windhoek, 3142 ft .

DISTRIBUTION: From Kaokoveld region in N Namibia south through Namibia to extreme NW Cape Prov. of South Africa south of the Orange River in Goodhouse and Pella areas; also recorded from C and W Cape Prov. and SW Angola by Skinner and Smithers (1990:314).

SYNONYMS: bruchus , capensis , kaokoensis, kurzi, namibensis, rufus , variabilis .

COMMENTS: Roberts (1951) listed capensis , known only from Goodhouse, as a species, and Meester et al. (1986) treated it as a synonym of barbouri . In describing it as a subspecies of P. collinus , however, Shortridge and Carter (1938) reflected its true affinities because its morphology is unlike P. barbouri , which Shortridge and Carter described in the same paper and knew well.

Roberts (1951) also treated bruchus (type locality is Great Brukkaros Mtn in S Namibia) as a separate species, allocating the northern shortridgei to it as a subspecies. The latter is clearly a species separate from P. collinus (see comments under shortridgei ), but the status of bruchus will have to be illuminated in a revision of Petromyscus ; the few specimens we studied from Great Brukkaros Mtn were examples of P. collinus .