Coendou rufescens ( Gray, 1865 )

Voss, Robert S., 2011, Revisionary Notes on Neotropical Porcupines (Rodentia: Erethizontidae) 3. An Annotated Checklist of the Species of Coendou Lacépède, 1799, American Museum Novitates 2011 (3720), pp. 1-1 : 1-

Coendou rufescens ( Gray, 1865)

Erethizon (Echinoprocta) rufescens Gray, 1865: 321 ; type locality “ Columbia ” (= Colombia).

Coendou prehensilis rufescens: Trouessart, 1897: 621 (name combination).

Echinoprocta rufescens: Cabrera, 1901: 159 (name combination).

Coendou sneiderni Lönnberg, 1937: 17 ; type locality “Munchique, Cauca ” in the Cordillera Occidental (western Andes) of Colombia .

Coendou rufescens: Alberico et al., 1999: 606 (name combination).

DISTRIBUTION: Based on examined specimens and credible literature records, Coendou rufescens occurs in all three Andean cordilleras of Colombia ( Alberico et al., 1999), on both slopes of the Ecuadorean Andes , in northern Peru (Lambayeque; Pacheco et al., 2009), and in northern Bolivia (Cochabamba; see Remarks , below). Elevations recorded on specimen tags and in the literature document an elevational range from about 800 to 3500 m above sea level, but most records are clustered in the interval from 1500 to 3000 m (Trouessart, 1920; Lönnberg, 1937; Alberico et al., 1999; Orcés and Albuja, 2004; this report) .

REMARKS: This species has long been referred to the monotypic genus Echinoprocta , but there is no compelling evidence that rufescens is anything other than a short-tailed species of Coendou . Because the retention of Echinoprocta as a distinct genus (e.g., by Woods and Kilpatrick, 2005) does not appear to be motivated by any defensible hypothesis of reciprocal monophyly, I follow Alberico et al. (1999) in treating it as a subjective junior synonym of Coendou . Subsequent to Gray’s (1865) original description, this species was redescribed by Cabrera (1901), Trouessart (1920), Lönnberg (1937), and Alberico et al. (1999). As noted by Alberico et al. (1999), most specimens have a naked, calloused patch of skin on the dorsal surface of the tip of the tail, suggesting that this organ is prehensile like those of other Neotropical porcupines (contra Ellerman, 1940).

The holotype of Coendou rufescens ( BMNH 53.9.28.30) is a young adult with newly erupted P4 and unfused cranial sutures. The skin is in excellent condition, but the skull (evidently extracted from the mounted skin sometime after Gray’s description) is fragmentary: the dentition is complete, but the occiput and most of the basicranium is missing, as is the right zygoma, most of the left zygoma, both nasals, and most of the premaxillae. In fact, the only taxonomically useful measurement that can be taken is length of the maxillary tooth row ( MTR), which is 15.6 mm. By comparison, the maxillary tooth rows of nine adult specimens collected in the Cordillera Occidental (western Andes) of Colombia range from 16.7 to 19.2 mm, whereas the