Myopus Miller, 1910

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 : 531

Myopus Miller, 1910 . Smithson. Mise. Coll., 52:497.

TYPE SPECIES: Myodes schisticolor Lilljeborg, 1844 .

COMMENTS: Tribe Lemmini . Conventionally treated as a genus until Chaline (1972) regarded the differences in molar pattern between schisticolor and Lemmus to only reflect specific-level distinctions (also see Chaline and Mein, 1979; Chaline et al., 1989). Koenigswald and Martin (1984) also cited molar-pattern similarity for their allocation of Myopus to a subgenus of Lemmus . Niethammer and Henttonen (1982) and Pavlinov and Rossolimo (1987), however, maintained the generic segregation of Myopus , as we do here. Lemmus and Myopus share certain dental resemblances, but they are readily distinguished by other features that have not been addressed in the context of assessing the interrelationship of forms comprising these genus-group taxa. In our opinion, the phenotypically restricted character set mustered from a paleontological perspective is insufficient to falsify the hypothesis that schisticolor represents a monophyletic group separate from species of Lemmus .