Entomyza cyanotis harterti Robinson and Laverock

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 116-117

Entomyza cyanotis harterti Robinson and Laverock

Entomyza cyanotis harterti Robinson and Laverock, 1900: 635 (Cooktown) .

Now considered intergradient between Entomyzon c. cyanotis and E. c. griseigularis. See Salomonsen, 1967: 399, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 274– 275, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 676.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 691779 , female, 18 July 1899 ; AMNH 691780 , female, 14 June 1899 ; AMNH 691781 , female, 9 June 1899, all collected at Cooktown, 15.29S, 145.15E (Times Atlas), Queensland, Australia, by E. Olive. From the Rothschild Collection .

COMMENTS: No type was designated by Robinson and Laverock in the original description, which was based on three females collected at Cooktown in June and July 1899. These three specimens are syntypes, and the male specimen, AMNH 691778 , collected by Olive at Cooktown on 10 February 1900 is not a syntype and has no type standing. The male, however, was the specimen that Hartert (1919a: 177) incorrectly listed as the type of harterti, probably because someone had written ‘‘ Type s’’ on the reverse of the label. It remains in the type collection with a label added to indicate that it is not a type ; because it was cataloged as a type when the Rothschild Collection came to AMNH, it has always been considered the type of harterti, even being erroneously considered the holotype by Schodde and Mason (1999: 275) .

Both Rothschild and Mathews purchased parts of Olive’s collections from Robinson. Mathews cataloged his Olive specimens under Robinson’s name in 1910 and apparently did not receive any specimens of this species. Rothschild had purchased his Olive skins from Robinson in 1900 and 1901, in small batches to a total of over 225 specimens, if they are all listed in Rothschild’s partial record of purchases ( Department of Ornithology Archives , AMNH). But the individual specimens included in these purchases are not given. It is also possible that Olive sold other specimens, either directly or through dealers. So it is not possible to determine how the male specimen of E. cyanotis harterti came to Rothschild ; howev- er, it was not part of the type series. On the other hand, it can be said that Rothschild purchased the entire type series of harterti.

One of the three syntypes is marked ‘‘Type subsp. harterti ,’’ but because of the intergradient nature of this population ( Schodde and Mason, 1999: 275), it seems prudent to retain all three syntypes in the AMNH type collection. It is perhaps of interest that, in checking Olive specimens, I have found that he sometimes wrote the female symbol in the currently conventional way and sometimes as an upside down male symbol (as on two of these syntypes), but he apparently always made the male symbol correctly.