Gracilinanus microtarsus (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 : 44

Gracilinanus microtarsus (Wagner, 1842)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: No type material was designated in Wagner’s original description, which was based on specimens collected at “Ypanema” (= Ipanema: 23.43° S, 47.60° W), São Paulo state, Brazil. As many as eight syntypes may have once been at the NMW (Pelzeln, 1883), but only four ( NMW B-2601, -2615, -2602A, -2602B) now remain there according to a list kindly provided by the current NMW mammal curator, Frank Zachos. Hershkovitz (1992) believed that one of them was designated as the lectotype by Tate (1933: table 1, section 7), although it is not clear that Tate really intended to do so.

SYNONYMS: erhardti Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936 .13

DISTRIBUTION: Gracilinanus microtarsus occurs in tropical and subtropical evergreen and semideciduous forests in southeastern Brazil (from Bahia southward to Rio Grande do Sul; Lóss et al., 2011: fig. 11), northeastern Argentina (Misiones; Teta et al., 2007), and possibly Uruguay (D’Elía and Martínez, 2006).

REMARKS: For an exemplary revision and redescription of this species, which exhibits substantial geographic variation in mtDNA sequences and morphology, see Lóss et al. (2011), who also provided illustrations and tabulated measurement data. There is reasonably strong support from phylogenetic analyses of at least one multilocus dataset that Gracilinanus microtarsus and G. agilis are sister species ( Díaz-Nieto et al., 2016a; Teta and Díaz-Nieto, 2019).