Rattus villosissimus (Waite, 1898)

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 : 662

Rattus villosissimus (Waite, 1898) . Proc. R. Soc. Victoria, 10:125.

TYPE LOCALITY: Australia, Queensland, "from probably the vicinity of Goonhaghooheeny Billabong, Cooper Creek" (see Mahoney and Richardson, 1988) .

DISTRIBUTION: Australia; broad inland range from NW Western Australia through Northern Territory into most of Queensland and N South Australia and N New South Wales (see map in Watts and Aslin, 1981:245).

SYNONYMS: longipilis (Gould, 1854, not Waterhouse, 1837), profusus.

COMMENTS: Geographic range is allopatric to the coastal R. sordidus in Queensland and R. colletti in Northern Territory (see map in Taylor and Horner, 1973:72). The three species are closely related; villosissimus was treated as a subspecies of R. sordidus by Taylor and Horner (1973), but is considered genically closer to colletti by Baverstock et al. (1983a, 1986). See accounts of sordidus and colletti . Analyses of electrophoretic data by Gemmeke and Niethammer (1984) indicated R. villosissimus to be greatly separated from R. argentiventer , R. exulans , R. norvegicus , and R. tiomanicus , and closer to species of Bandicota and Maxomys .