Echimyidae, Gray, 1825

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 : 115

Echimyidae

The Yavarí-Ucayali interfluve is rich in echimyid rodents, including one species each of Dactylomys , Isothrix , Makalata , Mesomys , and Toromys , and six species of Proechimys . Echimyid classification has undergone many changes in recent years as the result of progress in both morphology-based and molecular research. Although Emmons et al. (2015a) classified the species treated in this report as members of three subfamilies ( Dactylomyinae , Echimyinae , and Eumysopinae), all Amazonian echimyids are now placed in the subfamily Echimyinae ( Fabre et al., 2017; Courcelle et al., 2019). As currently recognized, this subfamily includes a diverse radiation of arboreal taxa (tribe Echimyini ) and a clade of predominantly terrestrial taxa (tribe Myocastorini ). Of the six genera known to occur in our region, five ( Dactylomys , Isothrix , Makalata , Mesomys , and Toromys ) belong to the tribe Echimyini , whereas Proechimys belongs to the tribe Myocastorini . In the absence of a published key to echimyine genera, 33 we summarize selected diagnostic comparisons of the taxa in our region (table 35), and we preface the taxonomic accounts that follow with brief descriptions of salient morphological traits.

33 To identify echimyine genera using the keys in Patton et al. (2015), it is necessary to start with the key to echimyid subfamilies.