Hyloterpe hypoxantha Sharpe

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 14

Hyloterpe hypoxantha Sharpe

Hyloterpe hypoxantha Sharpe, 1887: 451 (Kina Balu).

Now Pachycephala hypoxantha hypoxantha ( Sharpe, 1887) . See Smythies, 2000: 562, and Boles, 2007: 417.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 658376 , adult male, collected on Mt. Kinabalu , 06.03N, 116.32E (Times Atlas), Sabah, Malaysia, on 25 February 1887, by John Whitehead (no. 1018). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: All of the descriptions of Whitehead material in Sharpe (1887) were based on Whitehead’s 1887 collection, but not all of that collection remained in BMNH, part of it being purchased by Rothschild. In the original description of H. hypoxantha , no type was designated, and only the adult male was described. However, two of the three specimens collected by Whitehead in 1887 were marked on Whitehead’s field tag as ‘‘descr.’’ Whitehead (1893: 185) was in the habit of sending ahead to Sharpe ‘‘a pair of most birds that I thought would be new,’’ and the two specimens marked ‘‘descr’’ apparently are those two birds. The specimen that is now AMNH 658376 is also marked on the reverse of the Whitehead Collection label ‘‘Type RBS 1018,’’ indicating that this is the specimen Sharpe chose as his type (the description fits, see below). Hartert (1920a: 447) listed this specimen as the type and no type is listed for BMNH ( Warren and Harrison, 1971). AMNH 658380 is here considered the only paratype, female, collected on 20 February 1887 (Whitehead no. 987), Kinabalu, 3000 ft, marked ‘‘descr’’ on Whitehead’s field tag.

Later, when Sharpe (1889: 419) had all of Whitehead’s 1887 and 1888 collections from Kinabalu in hand, he listed a third 1887 specimen; however, he marked the specimen collected on 25 Feburary as ‘‘s juv’’ and a male collected on ‘‘20 February’’ as an adult. The 25th February specimen, listed above as the holotype, shows no rufous feathering and is certainly not a juvenile. However, it does show some signs of plumage not quite adult, and this was mentioned in the original description: ‘‘some of the outer [coverts] rusty brown on the outer webs,’’ ‘‘the secondaries rusty towards the ends of the outer webs, the innermost almost entirely rusty brown,’’ ‘‘reddish tinge on the hinder margin of the [ear-coverts].’’ These rusty edges on feathers do not occur on the female or on other fully adult specimens. Sharpe’s recorded date of collection of the second 1877 male in AMNH, AMNH 658378 (Whitehead field no. 1041), actually collected on 28 February, may represent an error in transcription. The description of the young bird ‘‘like the adults, but rather duller in colour, and has several rufous-edged feathers on the back, wings, and breast’’ fits this specimen exactly. However, I do not consider it a paratype because of Whitehead’s habit of sending ahead to Sharpe two specimens of suspected new taxa. That Whitehead’s field tag is not marked ‘‘descr’’ indicates that it was not one of those two.