Sciuridae, Fischer de Waldheim, 1817

Voss, Robert S., Fleck, David W. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2019, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 5. Rodents, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (466), pp. 1-180 : 9

Sciuridae

The taxonomy of Neotropical sciurids has long been disputed ( Allen, 1915a; Moore, 1959; Vivo and Carmignotto, 2015; Abreu et al., 2020b), and the resolution of several nomenclatural issues associated with the species treated below is beyond the scope of this study. Indeed, some of these problems are among the most frustrating that the first author has encountered in four decades of systematic research on mammals. The best we can do at this point is to document the basis for our binomial usage and explain why various alternatives seem less appropriate.

The five sciurid species that occur in our region include the pygmy squirrel ( Sciurillus pusillus ), which is often placed in its own tribe or subfamily in recognition of its wide phenotypic and genetic divergence from other squirrels ( Mercer and Roth, 2003; Vivo and Carmignotto, 2015; Abreu et al., 2022). The remaining four species in our region belong to a monophyletic, predominantly Neotropical radiation of tree squirrels (Sciurinae: Sciurini) that has usually been partitioned among two or more genera based on morphological characters that are now known to be homoplastic (e.g., mammary counts and numbers of premolars; Abreu et al., 2020b). The most recent classification of Sciurini recognized 13 genera and one unnamed clade based on phylogenetic analyses of mtDNA sequence data ( Abreu et al., 2020b), but it is not yet known whether any of these taxa are morphologically diagnosable, and the proposed restriction of Sciurus to just three Old World species would disrupt binomial usage for many New World species with previously undisputed names and a large ecological literature. The latter include S. carolinensis and S. niger , which would be known as Neosciurus carolinensis and Parasciurus niger , respectively, in Abreu et al.’s system. 1

Instead, we treat all Abreu et al.’s (2020b) genera of Sciurini (except Asian Reithrosciurus and North American Tamiasciurus ) as subgenera of Sciurus . This alternative classification is mono-

1 The names Sciurus carolinensis and S. niger have been used consistently for>200 years and occur in numerous publications on the North American fauna. The binomen Sciurus carolinensis , for example, appears in>12,000 articles indexed by Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com; accessed 10 May 2021).