Mus mattheyi Petter, 1969

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 : 624

Mus mattheyi Petter, 1969 . Mammalia, 33:118.

TYPE LOCALITY: Ghana, Accra .

DISTRIBUTION: Recognized only from the type locality.

COMMENTS: Subgenus Nannomys . This form has been recorded from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Ghana (F. Petter, 1969; Petter et al., 1971; Petter and Matthey, 1975), but after studying large series (in the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle and the National Museum of Natural History) of the haussa and musculoides complexes from west Africa, we are unable to assign anything to mattheyi . The morphological traits used to distinguish mattheyi from haussa by F. Petter (1969) and Petter and Matthey (1975) vary in a continuous fashion from typical haussa morphology to that considered diagnostic for mattheyi . The status of mattheyi needs to be reassessed in a taxonomic revision of the group. A chromosomal complement of 2N=36, FN=36 characterizes samples identified as M. mattheyi and is considered primitive for African Mus (F. Petter, 1969; Jotterand-Bellomo, 1986).