Metachirini

Voss, Robert S., Fleck, David W. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2019, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 3: Marsupials (Didelphimorphia), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2019 (432), pp. 1-89 : 41

Tribe Metachirini

Members of this tribe are commonly known as “brown four-eyed opossums” or “pouchless four-eyed opossums” to distinguish them from the grayish, pouched four-eyed opossums referred to Philander . The only included genus, Metachirus , was long thought to be monotypic, but molecular sequence analyses reported by Patton et al. (2000) and Patton and Costa (2003) recovered several mtDNA haplogroups, some of which were so highly divergent as to suggest the existence of multiple species. Indeed, there is no lack of available names for brown four-eyed opossums: in the last synthesis of the taxonomic literature ( Gardner and Dagosto, 2008), no fewer than 11 epithets were treated as synonyms or subspecies of M. nudicaudatus (Geoffroy, 1803) , the type locality of which is in northeastern Amazonia ( French Guiana). In the account that follows, we explain why we use a different binomen for the brown four-eyed opossums of the Yavarí- Ucayali interfluve.