Steatomys parvus Rhoads 1896

Wilson, Don E. & Reeder, DeeAnn, 2005, Order Rodentia - Family Nesomyidae, Mammal Species of the World: a Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (3 rd Edition), Volume 2, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 930-955 : 945

Steatomys parvus Rhoads 1896

Steatomys parvus Rhoads 1896 , Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia: 529.

Type Locality: Ethiopia, northern shore Lake Turkana, Rusia (see Yalden et al., 1996).

Vernacular Names: Tiny African Fat Mouse.

Synonyms: Steatomys aquilo Thomas and Hinton 1923 ; Steatomys athi Heller 1910 ; Steatomys kalaharicus Roberts 1932 ; Steatomys loveridgei Thomas 1919 ; Steatomys minutus Thomas and Wroughton 1905 ; Steatomys muanzae Kershaw 1923 ; Steatomys swalius Thomas 1926 ; Steatomys thomasi Setzer 1956 ; Steatomys umbratus Thomas 1926 .

Distribution: East and Southern Africa—S and EC Sudan (holotypes of aquilo and thomasi ; USNM specimens), S Ethiopia, and Somalia; south through Kenya ( Hollister, 1919; specimens in AMNH), Uganda ( Delany, 1975; AMNH 119143), and Tanzania ( Swynnerton and Hayman, 1951); to SW Angola ( Coetzee, 1977 a; Crawford-Cabral, 1998; AMNH 81949), NE Namibia, NW Botswana ( Smithers, 1971), W Zambia ( Ansell, 1978), and W Zimbabwe ( Smithers and Wilson, 1979).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Distribution and conservation status discussed as a savanna woodland species by Mugo et al. (1995). The single Ethiopian record was first listed as S. pratensis ( Yalden et al., 1976) and later reidentified as S. parvus ( Yalden et al., 1996) . Coetzee (1977 a) omitted thomasi from his review; Setzer’s (1956) large type series matches the range of variation in what is now regarded as S. parvus . Coetzee (1977 a) included the holotype and only specimen of aquilo ( EC Sudan, Jebel Marra) in S. parvus , although Thomas and Hinton (1923 a) believed it to be related to West African S. cuppedius . Southern African records reviewed and mapped by de Graaff (1997 gg), who included an isolate in KwaZulu-Natal, but Taylor (1998) reallocated those specimens to S. krebsii . Steatomys parvus has not been found south of NE Namibia and NW Botswana, nor have we located any samples between S Sudan and the eastern range limits of West African S. cuppedius (see account).