Galea spixii (Wagler, 1831)

Gutierrez, Eliecer E. & Marinho-Filho, Jader, 2017, The mammalian faunas endemic to the Cerrado and the Caatinga, ZooKeys 644, pp. 105-157 : 115-116

Galea spixii (Wagler, 1831)

Distribution.

Galea spixii is endemic to the Caatinga, and has been recorded in the Brazilian states of Alagoas, Bahia, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Pará, Pernambuco, São Paulo ( Bezerra 2008, Norgueira et al. 2015, Dunnum 2015 and references therein).

Taxonomy.

Some authors have regarded Galea spixii and Galea flavidens as different species ( Ellerman 1941, Bonvicino et al. 2005, Weksler and Bonvicino 2008a, Dunnum 2015); however the latter species has never been incorporated into a phylogenetic study based on molecular data (e.g., Dunnum and Salazar-Bravo 2010), and a modern morphological study that included all extant species in the genus did not find differences to distinguish Galea flavidens from Galea spixii ( Bezerra 2008; but see Bonvicino et al. 2008). We follow Bezerra (2008) in treating Galea flavidens as a junior synonym of Galea spixii . The same author also found that populations currently referred to as Galea spixii actually might be composed by multiple valid species ( Bezerra 2008).

Conservation status.

The red list of the IUCN ver. 3.1 assigned the category "Least Concern" to Galea spixii (see Catzeflis et al. 2016a). The species was not included in the official list of threatened species of Brazil ( ICMBIO-MMA 2016).