Microdelphys Burmeister, 1856

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 : 21

Subgenus Microdelphys Burmeister, 1856

TYPE SPECIES: Didelphis tristriata Illiger, 1815 (= Monodelphis americana ; see below), by subsequent designation ( Thomas, 1888a).

SYNONYMS: None.

REMARKS: See Pavan and Voss (2016) for a morphological diagnosis of this distinctive taxon. Monophyly of Microdelphys as recognized herein was consistently supported by parsimony, maximum-likelihood, and Bayesian analyses of multilocus sequence data reported by Pavan et al. (2014, 2016). Although subgeneric monophyly was not supported by maximum-likelihood and Bayesian analyses of a multigene dataset reported by Vilela et al. (2015), none of the conflicting nodes in Vilela et al.’s results were strongly supported. Four species are currently recognized.