Megalonychidae

Ahmed S. Thandar & Lazaro W. V. Vinola, 2017, The current status of Neocnus Arredondo, 1961 (Mammalia: Edentata: Pilosa: Megalonichidae) and a replacement name for its junior homonym in the sea cucumber family Cucumariidae (Echinodermata: Holothuroidea: Dendrochirotida: Cucumariidae), Zootaxa 4337 (2), pp. 288-290 : 288

Family Megalonychidae

Genus Neocnus Arredondo, 1961 (Cuba and Hispaniola).

Acratocnus (?) Miller, 1929; Microcnus Matthew, 1931 ; Synocnus Paula Couto, 1967 ; Cubanocnus Kretzoi, 1968 .

Type species. Micronocnus gliriformis Matthew, 1931 .

Type locality. Casimba en las Llanadas, Sierra de Jatibonico, Cuba

Other species included: Synocnus comes Paula Couto, 1967 ; N. dousman MacPhee et al., 2000 ; N. toupiti MacPhee et al. 2000 (Hispaniola) .

HoweVer, quite inadVertently, Cherbonnier (1972) erected the genus Neocnus , with the type species N. incubans Cherbonnier, 1972 , to accommodate his new species of an incubatory Mediterranean cucumariid holothuroid with external brood pouches, from Tunisia. Since then, as far as we could ascertain from aVailable literature, this species was also recorded from Canary Islands by Pérez-Ruzafa (1984) and briefly described by AlVÀ (1991), its brooding and marsupium structure described by AlVÀ & Jangoux, M. (1992) and the species listed from Canary Islands by Hansson, (2001) and again by Hernández et al. (2013). The generic name Neocnus Cherbonnier (1972) , was then used by Rowe & Vail (1982) and again by O‘Loughlin (1991), to accommodate an indetermined cucumariid dendrochirotid from southern Australia, as Neocnus sp., which subsequently, O’ Loughlin & O’Hara (1992), named and re-described as N. bimarsupiis . None of the aboVe authors recognized that the name Neocnus was already used by Arredondo (1961) to accommodate a group of “prehistoric” sloths as mentioned aboVe, a name which antedates Neocnus Cherbonnier, 1972 by some 11 years and hence constitutes a senior homonym, not aVailable for another taxon. This was brought to the attention of holothuroid taxonomists in a newsletter by some independent researchers but none of them proposed a new name for the junior homonym until one of us ( VLWV) again encountered this anomaly and proposed to AST that the junior homonym Neocnus Cherbonnier, 1972 , must be replaced. We therefore, diagnose the replacement name Incubocnus n.g. for this group of incubating cucumariid holothuroids, with Neocnus incubans Cherbonnier, 1972 as type species. The diagnosis of the new genus is the same for Neocnus , as amended by O’ Loughlin & O’Hara (1992), which is here reproduced with slight paraphrasing.