Monodelphis (Monodelphis) glirina (Wagner, 1842)

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 : 24

Monodelphis (Monodelphis) glirina

(Wagner, 1842)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: NMW B-2626, the holotype by monotypy ( Bezerra et al., 2018), consists of the skin and skull of a young adult male collected at “Mamore” (= Cachoeira do Pau Grande on the Rio Mamoré: 10.47° S, 65.40° W), Rondônia state, Brazil.

SYNONYMS: maraxina Thomas, 1923 .

DISTRIBUTION: As currently recognized, Monodelphis glirina occurs from northeastern Bolivia (La Paz, Pando) and eastern Peru (Ucayali, Madre de Dios, Cusco) across southern Amazonian Brazil to eastern Pará (including Marajó Island) ( Pavan, 2019: fig. 1).

REMARKS: For an emended description, illustrations, and tabulated measurement data, see Pavan, (2019). Although Monodelphis glirina and M. maraxina (with type locality on Marajó Island) were recognized as distinct species by Pine and Handley (2008), phylogenetic analyses of mtDNA sequence data reported by Pavan et al. (2014) recovered a topotype of maraxina nested within a clade comprised of mainland specimens with the phenotypic traits of glirina , so these taxa are currently regarded as conspecific. Nevertheless, M. glirina is known to include two highly divergent mtDNA haplogroups, one of which is in Bolivia and western Brazil, whereas the other is in central and eastern Brazil. As noted by Bezerra et al. (2018), the name maraxina is available for the latter haplogroup if these mtDNA clades were eventually shown to be taxonomically distinct, but neither coat-color nor morphometric variation seems to correlate with haplogroup membership ( Pavan, 2019).