Rattus sordidus (Gould, 1858)

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 659

Rattus sordidus (Gould, 1858) . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1857:242 [1858].

TYPE LOCALITY: Australia, Queensland, open plains Darling Downs = locality of lectotype (see Mahoney and Richardson, 1988) .

DISTRIBUTION: Australia; E coast from the tip of Cape York to NE New South Wales, and some off-shore islands (see Watts and Aslin, 1981:239). New Guinea; lowlands south of Central Cordillera from Dobodura in E Papua New Guinea west and north to Koembe in Irian Jaya (see map in Taylor et al., 1983:265).

SYNONYMS: aramia, brachyrhinus , bunae, conatus , gestri, gestroi, youngi .

COMMENTS: One of the two species of native Rattus in the New Guinea-Australian region that occurs on both land masses. On morphological evidence, Taylor and Horner (1973) arranged villosissimus and colletti as subspecies of R. sordidus . Later evaluations, however, based on chromosomal, biochemical, and hybridization data, suggested the three should be viewed as separate species in the same monophyletic cluster ( Baverstock et al., 1977d, 1983a, 1986), which is the way they are treated in current faunal accounts and catalogs ( Mahoney and Richardson, 1988; Watts and Aslin, 1981).