Gracilinanus agilis (Burmeister, 1854)

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 : 43

Gracilinanus agilis (Burmeister, 1854)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: IZH M-27, the holotype by monotypy, consists of the mounted skin and extracted skull of a young adult male collected at Lagoa Santa (19.63° S, 43.82° W), Minas Gerais state, Brazil.

SYNONYMS: beatrix Thomas, 1910; blaseri Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936; rondoni MirandaRibeiro, 1936.

DISTRIBUTION: Gracilinanus agilis occurs in gallery forests and other woody formations of the Cerrado and Caatinga in northeastern and central Brazil (Bahia, Ceará, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Piauí) and eastern Bolivia (Santa Cruz); it also occurs in subtropical forests in eastern Paraguay (Caazapá, Canindeyú, Cordillera, Paraguarí). No published range map adequately represents the distribution of this species: Creighton and Gardner’s (2008 b) map includes records based on specimens now known to represent G. peruanus , whereas the maps in Costa et al. (2003), Faria et al. (2013b), and Semedo et al. (2015) only show collection localities of sequenced Brazilian material.

REMARKS: Illustrations, measurements, and morphological comparisons with other congeners are in Costa et al. (2003), Geise and Astúa (2009), Lóss et al. (2011), and Semedo et al. (2015). Gracilinanus peruanus was listed as a synonym of G. agilis by Creighton and Gardner (2008 b), but these nonsister taxa are genetically and morphologically distinct, and they are known to occur sympatrically ( Semedo et al. 2015). Phylogenetic analysis of at least one taxon-dense multilocus dataset provides reasonably strong support for G. agilis as the sister taxon of G. microtarsus ( Díaz-Nieto et al., 2016a) .