Pteropus degener Peters, 1876

Turni, Hendrik & Kock, Dieter, 2008, Type specimens of bats (Chiroptera: Mammalia) in the collections of the Museum f r Naturkunde, Berlin, Zootaxa 1869 (1), pp. 1-82 : 15

Pteropus degener Peters, 1876

Peters, W.C.H. (1876) Mittheilung über die Pelzrobbe von den Inseln St. Paul und Amsterdam und über die von S.M.S. Gazelle mitgebrachten Flederthiere. Monatsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1876: 318 [315–319].

Valid name: Pteropus neohibernicus Peters, 1876

Holotype: ZMB 4996 , skin and skull (damaged), male, adult (old); Aru Ids., Indonesia; collected by J. Cockerell; purchased from Gerrard.

Comment: Andersen (1912: 389) suggested that P. degener is rather P. neohibernicus , and that the locality of P. degener was incorrect. This conclusion is supported by the fact that J. Cockerell, in the middle of the 1870s, accompanied the Rev. George Brown on a voyage to the Bismarck Archipelago, and he is not known to have collected in the Aru Islands. The geographic origin of the holotype (Aru Islands) was supplied by the dealer Gerrard and may actually be correct as discussed in Helgen (in prep.).