Ochotona cansus Lyon, 1907

Robert S. Hoffmann, 1993, Order Lagomorpha, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 807-827 : 807

Ochotona cansus Lyon, 1907 . Smithson. Mise. Coll., 50:136.

TYPE LOCALITY: "Taocheo, Kan-su, China " [Lintan, Gannan A.D., Gansu, China] .

DISTRIBUTION: C China (Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan); isolated populations in Shaanxi and Shanxi.

STATUS: The Shanxi subspecies sorella , isolated in the extreme northwest of the species range, may be extinct. It is known from only a few specimens, and has not been found in over 50 years.

SYNONYMS: morosa Thomas, 1912; sorella Thomas, 1908 ; stevensi Osgood, 1932.

COMMENTS: Büchner (1890) originally included this species in the quite different O. roylei , but in recent years it has usually been assigned to O. thibetana ( Allen, 1938; Argyropulo, 1948; Corbet, 1978c; Ellerman and Morrison-Scott, 1951; Gureev, 1964; Honacki et al., 1982; Weston, 1982). Recent studies showed that cansus and thibetana are broadly sympatric, with distinct ecological niches, and morphological characters that do not intergrade ( Feng and Kao, 1974; Feng and Zheng, 1985). The latter authors, without access to holotypes, assigned the race morosa to thibetana , but it is an isolated subspecies of cansus that is sympatric with O. thibetana in the Tsing Ling Shan, Shaanxi Province (A. T. Smith et al., 1990, and references therein).