Caluromys (Mallodelphys) lanatus (Olfers, 1818)

Voss, Robert S., 2022, An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (455), pp. 1-77 : 8

Caluromys (Mallodelphys) lanatus (Olfers, 1818)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: MNCN- M2630, the holotype by monotypy, consists of the skin and skull of a juvenile male collected at Caazapá (26.15° S, 56.40° W), Caazapá department, Paraguay (Voss et al., 2009).

SYNONYMS: bartletti Matschie, 1917; cahyensis Matschie, 1917; cicur Bangs, 1898; hemiurus Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936; jivaro Thomas, 1913; juninensis Matschie, 1917 ; lanigera Desmarest, 1820; meridensis Matschie, 1917; modestus Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936; nattereri Matschie, 1917; ochropus Wagner, 1842; ornatus Tschudi, 1845; vitalinus Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936.

DISTRIBUTION: Caluromys lanatus occurs in rainforest, dry forest, and premontane forest from northern Colombia to eastern Bolivia, eastern Paraguay, and southeastern Brazil (Fonseca and Astúa, 2015: fig. 3). Most records are from Amazonia, the Cerrado, and the lower slopes of the tropical Andes, but the species is also known to occur in the subtropical Paraguayan extension of the Atlantic Forest ( Owen et al., 2018).

REMARKS: To date, mtDNA sequence data for Caluromys lanatus are available only from western Amazonian and Cerrado samples, which exhibit little genetic divergence and a striking absence of phylogeographic structure ( Voss et al., 2019: fig. 7); these results clearly support Fonseca and Astúa’s (2015) suggestion that just one taxon (for which ochropus is the oldest available name if any trinomial classification were warranted) occurs throughout these regions. Although specimens from eastern Paraguay and southeastern Brazil (representing the nominotypical form) appear to differ morphologically from western Amazonian and Cerrado material (Fonseca and Astúa, 2015; Voss et al., 2019), the taxonomic significance of such comparisons is unclear in the absence of genetic data.