Marmosa (Micoureus) phaea Thomas, 1899

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 : 19

Marmosa (Micoureus) phaea Thomas, 1899

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: BMNH 98.9 .5.2, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of a young adult female collected at San Pablo (1.10° N, 78.02° W; ca. 1500 m), Nariño department, Colombia .

SYNONYMS: None.

DISTRIBUTION: Specimens that resemble the type of Marmosa phaea are from Andean foothills and middle elevations (between ca. 1200 and 2800 m) in the Colombian departments of Cauca, Huila, and Nariño.

REMARKS: This species has not been critically evaluated since Tate (1933), and it badly needs revisionary attention. Voss et al. (2020) recovered a strongly supported haplogroup that they associated with the name Marmosa phaea , but some of the phaea -like sequences in their study came from specimens that differ in size and qualitative craniodental traits from typical material, and other specimens are from implausibly distant localities (e.g., in northern Venezuela and northwestern Brazil; Voss et al., 2020: fig. 2). Gardner and Creighton (2008a) listed M. perplexa as a synonym of M. phaea , but subsequent research has shown that these are unequivocally distinct species (Voss and Giarla, 2021).