Acanthagenys rufogularis queenslandicus Mathews

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 163-164

Acanthagenys rufogularis queenslandicus Mathews

Acanthagenys rufogularis queenslandicus Mathews, 1912a: 421 (North Queensland).

Now Acanthagenys rufogularis Gould, 1838 . See Salomonsen, 1967: 445, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 295–296, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185– 191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 618–619.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 696558 , said by Mathews to have been collected in northern Queensland, Australia. From the Mathews Collection (no. 7771) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews cited his catalog number of the holotype in the original description and gave the range of queenslandicus as ‘‘North Queensland.’’ The specimen was cataloged by Mathews as a single specimen of this species from the J.A. Thorpe collection, but it no longer has an original label nor any other data on its existing labels. It bears a Mathews and a Rothschild type label and a ‘‘Figured’’ label, indicating that it was illustrated in Mathews (1925a, pl. 553, opp. p. 88, text p. 89), where it is confirmed as the type of queenslandicus. Based on the published description, it is the lower figure in the plate. Both figures in this plate are identified on the plate as females, and the specimen described in Mathews (1925a: 89) is said to be a female, but the specimen is sexed as a male in Mathews’ catalog. Although some of Thorpe’s specimens were collected on Cape York, the majority of them were from New South Wales, and I consider the ‘‘N. Queensland’’ entered by Mathews in his catalog to be questionable, given the absence of an original label. Other specimens in AMNH from the Rothschild Collection collected in north Queensland had never been in the Mathews Collection.