Marmosops (Sciophanes) woodalli (Pine, 1981)

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 : 53

Marmosops (Sciophanes) woodalli (Pine, 1981)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: USNM 393532, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult female collected at the Nova Área Experimental Utinga near Belém (1.45° S, 48.48° W), Pará state, Brazil.

SYNONYMS: None.

DISTRIBUTION: As currently recognized (see Remarks), Marmosops woodalli occurs in southeastern Amazonia from the right bank of the Rio Xingu eastward along the south bank of the Amazon and the Atlantic coast to Maranhão ; it also ranges southward along the Tocantins and

Araguaia rivers into northern Tocantins ( Ferreira et al., 2020: fig. 5).

REMARKS: Marmosops woodalli was treated as a synonym of M. pinheiroi by Díaz-Nieto and Voss (2016), but it has recently been treated as a distinct species by Brazilian authors. Although M. pinheiroi and M. woodalli are listed here as valid species in deference to my colleagues, these taxa exhibit broad morphometric overlap ( Ferreira et al., 2020: tables 4, 5; fig. 1) and appear to lack unambiguously diagnostic qualitative traits ( Ferreira et al., 2020: table 6). Additionally, inconsistent results have been obtained from relevant species-delimitation analyses ( Guimarães et al., 2021). In effect, these allopatric forms seem dubiously distinct and merit critical evaluation when more material becomes available, especially from geographically intermediate localities such as Marajó Island.