Grammomys cometes (Thomas and Wroughton, 1908)

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 : 592-593

Grammomys cometes (Thomas and Wroughton, 1908) . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1908:549.

TYPE LOCALITY: Mozambique, Inhambane .

DISTRIBUTION: From Pirie Forest (northwest of King William's Town) in SE Cape Prov. of South Africa north through Natal and Transvaal into E Zimbabwe (Melsetter and Umtali districts) and Mozambique south of the Zambezi River (see Meester et al., 1986; Smither and Tello, 1976; Skinner and Smithers, 1990).

SYNONYMS: silindensis .

COMMENTS: The geographic range of G. cometes has been outlined as extending north from South Africa through East Africa to S Sudan ( Hutterer and Dieterlen, 1984) but pending revisionary study of the genus we restrict it to the eastern segment of the Southern African Subregion south of Zambezi River (similar to the rang mapped by Skinner and Smithers, 1990:225), and consider samples north of that river to be G. ibeanus (see that account). We studied the holotype of cometes and the other specimens in the type series noted by Thomas and Wroughton (1908); these animals are on average larger and have more highly inflated bullae than do those from north of the Zambesi River. Ansell (1978) and Ansell and Dowsett (1988) assigned samples from Zambia and Malawi to cometes , but were also impressed with the chromatic and morphological contrast between them and the holotype from Inhambane. The specimen from the Pirie Forest (in the American Museum of Natural History) represents a range extension south of Natal.