Grammomys dolichurus (Smuts, 1832)

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 : 593

Grammomys dolichurus (Smuts, 1832) . Enumer. Mamm. Capensium, p. 38.

TYPE LOCALITY: South Africa, near Cape Town .

DISTRIBUTION: From Nigeria east to SW Ethiopia, south through N Zaire, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi, and to South Africa (Natal and Cape Prov.), and west through Zimbabwe and Zambia to Angola; limits of geographic range unresolved.

SYNONYMS: angolensis , arborarius (of True, 1892, not Peters, 1852), baliolus, discolor , elgonis, insignis , littoralis , polionops, surdaster , tongensis.

COMMENTS: The number of scientific names reflects morphological and chromosomal variation correlated with geography that suggests more than one species is represented ( Hutterer and Dieterlen, 1984; Meester et al., 1986); the complex requires careful revision. For example, specimens of true dolichurus from South Africa have duller pelage and more inflated bullae than animals from East and West Africa; should these prove to be diagnostic specific differences, the northern populations should be identified as G. surdaster . The Ethiopian locality is based on a specimen from Kefa (in the National Museum of Natural History) and not on those recorded by Yalden et al. (1976), which represent other species (see Hutterer and Dieterlen, 1984).