Didelphis imperfecta Mondolfi and Pérez-Hernández, 1984

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 : 35

Didelphis imperfecta Mondolfi and Pérez-Hernández, 1984

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: MHNLS 1751 , the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult female collected at Kilometer 125 (ca. 6.03° N, 68.65° W; 1100 m) on the road from El Dorado to Santa Elena de Uairén, Bolívar state, Venezuela .

SYNONYMS: None.

DISTRIBUTION: Specimens identified as Didelphis imperfecta have been reported from montane forest, lowland savannas, and lowland rainforest in the Guianas, eastern and southern Venezuela, eastern Colombia, and Brazil north of the Amazon ( Caramaschi et al., 2013; González et al., 2020: fig. 1).

REMARKS: This taxon was originally named as a subspecies of Didelphis albiventris , but Voss and Emmons (1996) imprudently recognized it as a valid species despite the absence of compelling phenotypic or genetic criteria for specimen identification (see Remarks for D. albiventris , above). Unfortunately, D. imperfecta now appears to be nothing more than a binomial convention for D. albiventris -like specimens collected north of the Amazon.