Marmosa (Exulomarmosa) mexicana Merriam, 1897

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 : 11

Marmosa (Exulomarmosa) mexicana Merriam, 1897

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: USNM 71526 , the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at “Juquila” (= Santa Catarina Juquila: 16.23° N, 97.30° S; 1500 m), Oaxaca state, Mexico .

SYNONYMS: mayensis Osgood, 1913 ; ruatanica Goldman, 1911; savannarum Goldman, 1917.

DISTRIBUTION: As currently recognized (see Remarks), Marmosa mexicana is known from rainforested and dry-forested localities from northern Mexico (Tamaulipas) southward and eastward throughout Central America to eastern Panama ( Rossi et al., 2010: fig. 17).

REMARKS: See Rossi et al. (2010) for an emended description, tabulated measurement data, and morphological comparisons with congeneric species. As reported by Gutiérrez et al. (2010), mtDNA sequences from specimens that fit the morphological description of Marmosa mexicana form two highly divergent haplogroups. Some authors (e.g., Ramírez-Pulido et al., 2014) now recognize M. mayensis as a distinct species— presumably based on Gutiérrez et al.’s sequencing results—but diagnostic morphological characters are elusive, and no sequence data are available from holotypes or topotypes to confidently assign names to either mtDNA clade. Marmosa mexicana was formerly thought to be conspecific with M. zeledoni (e.g., by Tate, 1933), but evidence that these are separate species was summarized by Rossi et al. (2010) and Gutiérrez et al (2010).