Marmosops (Sciophanes) fuscatus (Thomas, 1896)

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 : 49-50

Marmosops (Sciophanes) fuscatus

(Thomas, 1896)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: BMNH 96.11.1.6, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an old adult female collected at 1630 m elevation along the Río “Abbaregas” (= Albarregas) near the city of

Mérida (8.60° N, 71.13° W), Mérida state, Venezuela.

SYNONYMS: cracens Handley and Gordon, 1979 .

DISTRIBUTION: Marmosops fuscatus is known from just four localities from sea level to 1600 m in northwestern Venezuela, including two in the Cordillera de Mérida, one in the Cordillera de San Luís (in western Falcón), and another in the coastal lowlands of eastern Falcón (Díaz-Nieto and Voss, 2016: fig. 17). Most of the localities previously mapped for this species by Gardner and Creighton (2008b) were based on specimens that Díaz-Nieto and Voss (2016) reidentified as M. carri .

REMARKS: For illustrations, an emended description, measurement data, and morphological comparisons with closely related congeners, see Díaz-Nieto and Voss (2016), who assigned Marmosops fuscatus to the eponymous species group based on phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequence data previously reported by DíazNieto et al. (2016b). The holotype of the nominal taxon perfusca Thomas, 1924, which Tate (1933) treated as a synonym of M. fuscatus and which Gardner and Creighton (2008b) treated as a valid subspecies, does not exhibit the diagnostic traits of the subgenus Sciophanes . Instead, Díaz-Nieto and Voss (2016) treated perfusca as a synonym of M. caucae (a species in the nominotypical subgenus), as it is also listed in this report (see above).