Marmosa (Micoureus) demerarae Thomas, 1905

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 : 17

Marmosa (Micoureus) demerarae Thomas, 1905

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: BMNH 5.11 .1.25, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult female collected at “Comackka” (= Takama: 5.57° N, 57.92° W; ca. 100 m), East Demerara-West Coast Berbice, Guyana .

SYNONYMS: arenticola Tate, 1931; esmeraldae Tate, 1931; limae Thomas, 1920; meridae Tate, 1931; pfrimeri Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936.

DISTRIBUTION: As currently recognized (see Remarks), Marmosa demerarae occurs from eastern Venezuela eastward and southward throughout the Guianas to Brazil. In Brazil, this species occurs east of the Rio Negro on the north side of the Amazon; it occurs east of the Tapajós along the south bank of the Amazon, and it occurs as far south as Bahia along the Atlantic coast ( Silva et al., 2019: fig. 5; Voss et al., 2020: fig. 2).

REMARKS: This concept of Marmosa demerarae follows Silva et al. (2019) and includes several cytochrome b haplogroups from south of the Amazon that Voss et al. (2020) recognized as putative species and associated with the name limae. However, the latter authors cautioned that their voucher specimens of limae might not be phenotypically distinguishable from M. demerarae , and subsequent examination of large series of specimens from south of the Amazon has likewise failed to find compelling evidence that limae is a distinct species.