Heliosciurus rufobrachium ( Waterhouse, 1842 )

Denys, Christiane, Missoup, Alain Didier, Nicolas, Violaine, Sylla, Morlaye, Douno, Mory, Kadjo, Blaise, Lalis, Aude & Monadjem, Ara, 2025, Annotated checklist of rodents from a biodiversity hotspot, Mount Nimba (West Africa), Zoosystema 47 (27), pp. 617-689 : 655

Heliosciurus rufobrachium ( Waterhouse, 1842)

Sciurus rufobrachium Waterhouse, 1842: 202 .

REMARKS

We did not collected any new specimen of H. rufobrachium during our survey but Monadjem took pictures of this species in West Nimba ( Appendix 7). Heim de Balsac collected three specimens (MNHN) from the Nimba massif on the Côte d’Ivoire side with no specific locality. Misonne & Verschuren (1976) collected only one specimen in Liberia. In NMK, three specimens were found but only two with museum numbers: NMK 326 and 378. The species is also known under the subspecies name H. rufobrachium maculatus ( Temminck, 1853) from Seredou (Ziama massif, Guinea) ( Roche 1971). Two specimens were found hunted in Serengbara in 2004- 2005 ( Dufour 2006).

The Nimba H. rufobrachium is characterized, compared to H. punctatus , by bright red or reddish-brown limbs contrasting with the dark brown dorsal pelage. The dorsal hairs are speckled with white and yellow. The head is of the same color as the dorsal part. The tail is longer than HB and has black dorsal hairs speckled with white-yellow and a very small terminal tuft ( Appendix 7). The external measurements are provided in Table 11 . As in the other Heliosciurus species, the skull is of medium size and has well marked post orbital processes. The nasals are short and domed The incisors are orange and proodont. There are small incisive foramina and a marked masseteric tubercle. The P3 is small and the tympanic bullae are homogeneously curved and do not harbour signs of transbular septa externally. The skull dimensions of the Nimba specimen fit well within the variability observed for the species in Seredou and in the NHM specimens ( Table 12 ) and with the redescription of the species by Thomas et al. (2019).