Hylomyscus alleni (Waterhouse, 1838)

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 : 598

Hylomyscus alleni (Waterhouse, 1838) . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1837:77 [1838].

TYPE LOCALITY: Equatorial Guinea, Fernando Poo (= Bioko), Gulf of Guinea .

DISTRIBUTION: Equatorial Guinea (Bioko = Fernando Poo); and W Africa from Guinea (Mt. Nimba) to Gabon and Cameroon; limits unknown.

SYNONYMS: canus , simus.

COMMENTS: We do not follow Rosevear (1969) in restricting H. alleni to Fernando Poo, and agree with Eisentraut (1969b) and Robbins et al. (1980) in recognizing the species in W Africa (based on our study of Eisentraut's series and other specimens). Robbins et al. (1980) reported sympatry between alleni and stella in S Cameroon, as well as cranial and chromosomal distinctions. However, the morphological differences they noted are slight and variable even with a single sample, the karyotypes have the same 2N of 46 and only differ slightly in fundamental numbers (68 versus 70), and they did not demonstrate that the contrasts did not represent intrapopulational variation. The chromosomal contrasts are not impressive considering that a sample of H. Stella from Burundi had 2N=48 and NF=86 ( Maddalena et al., 1989). Some authors ( Heim de Balsac and Aellen, 1965; Brosset et al., 1965) regard simus as the species distributed throughout W Africa and into Angola, and stella to be the form in C Africa, but we follow Rosevear (1969) in not being able to distinguish any sample that could be called simus. The definitions of both alleni and stella on continental Africa need clarification, as Rosevear (1969) so cogently discussed.