Pastinachus Rueppell

Peter R. Last, B. Mabel Manjaji & Gordon K. Yearsley, 2005, Pastinachus solocirostris sp. nov., a new species of Stingray (Elasmobranchii: Myliobatiformes) from the Indo-Malay Archipelago., Zootaxa 1040, pp. 1-16 : 1

[[ Pastinachus Rueppell ]]

Pastinachus is generally considered to be a monotypic genus with a widespread species, P. sephen ( Forsskal, 1775) , occurring across the Indo-Pacific from the Red Sea to Australia, including Melanesia, Micronesia, and the China Seas (Last & Compagno, 1999). Five nominal species are presumed to be junior synonyms: Taeniura atra Macleay, 1883 (Last and Stevens, 1994), Raia fluviatilis Hamilton, 1822 (Roberts, 1998), Trigon forskalii Rueppell, 1829 (Nishida and Nakaya, 1990), Dasybatus gruveli Chabanaud, 1923 (Last and Compagno, 1999), and Raia sancur Hamilton, 1822 (Talwar and Jhingran, 1991). Recent research on Indo-West Pacific dasyatids has shown that more than one species of Pastinachus exists in the region and some of these names may need to be resurrected. Most of these unidentified taxa are very similar morphologically to P. sephen . In this manuscript, a new species with an unusual, distinctive angular snout covered in rough denticles is described based on material collected from Malaysian Borneo and Indonesia.