Marmosa (Exulomarmosa) robinsoni Bangs, 1898

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 : 12

Marmosa (Exulomarmosa) robinsoni Bangs, 1898

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: MCZ B7749 , the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at El Valle de Espírito Santo (10.98° N, 63.87° W; ca. 200 m) on Isla Margarita, Nueva Esparta state, Venezuela ( Rossi et al., 2010) .

SYNONYMS: casta Thomas, 1911; chapmani Allen, 1900; fulviventer Bangs, 1901; grenadae Thomas, 1911; luridivolta Goodwin, 1961; mitis Bangs, 1898 ; nesaea Thomas, 1911; pallidiventris Osgood, 1912.

DISTRIBUTION: Marmosa robinsoni occurs primarily in dry forests, but also occasionally in other habitats from western Panama to Colombia, northern Venezuela, and several adjacent continental-shelf islands (including Isla Margarita, Trinidad, and Tobago); the species is also known from Grenada, a Caribbean island that is not on the continental shelf ( Rossi et al., 2010: fig. 25).

REMARKS: See Rossi et al. (2010) for an emended description, tabulated measurement data, and morphological comparisons with congeneric species. Several taxa that were formerly treated as subspecies or synonyms of Marmosa robinsoni (e.g., by Hershkovitz, 1951; Hall, 1981; Creighton and Gardner, 2008a) are now recognized as valid species ( M. isthmica , M. simonsi ) or have been relegated to the synonymies of other species. Even in its currently restricted sense ( Rossi et al., 2010), however, M. robinsoni is a geographically and ecologically widespread species that includes numerous nominal taxa as subjective synonyms. Analyses of DNA sequence data ( Gutiérrez et al., 2014a) have shown that geographic populations of this species sort out into two strongly supported phylogroups: an eastern clade for which the oldest available trinomen would be M. robinsoni robinsoni , and a western clade for which the oldest trinomen would be M. r. mitis . Unfortunately, these putative subspecies appear to be phenotypically indistinguishable, such that specimens cannot be assigned to one or the other without DNA sequence data.