Lutreolina crassicaudata (Desmarest, 1804)

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 : 37

Lutreolina crassicaudata (Desmarest, 1804)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: No type material is known to exist. The species is based on Felix de Azara’s description of two specimens that he examined from eastern Paraguay ( Voss et al., 2009a).

SYNONYMS: bonaria Thomas, 1923; crassicaudis Olfers, 1818; ferruginea Larrañaga, 1923; lutrilla Thomas, 1923; macroura Desmoulins, 1824; paranalis Thomas, 1923; travassosi Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936; turneri Günther, 1879.

DISTRIBUTION: The distribution of Lutreolina crassicaudata is famously disjunct, with one population in the Llanos and adjacent savannas of northern South America (eastern Colombia, Venezuela, and Guyana) and a second in tropical and subtropical open habitats of eastern Bolivia, southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and northern Argentina (Stein and Patton, 2008b: map 9).

REMARKS: Voss and Jansa’s (2009) description of Lutreolina was based exclusively on L. crassicaudata , and so serves as a description of the species as well. By convention, the northern population (in Colombia, Guyana, and Venezuela) is known as L. c. turneri, whereas the southern population is referred to L. c. crassicaudata . Although other subspecies have been recognized based on specimens from southern Brazil and northern Argentina, analyses of cytochrome b sequence data ( Martínez-Lanfranco et al., 2014) suggest remarkably little phylogeographic structure within what is currently considered the nominotypical form.