Thylamys (Thylamys) sponsorius (Thomas, 1921)

Voss, Robert S., 2022, An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (455), pp. 1-77 : 55

Thylamys (Thylamys) sponsorius (Thomas, 1921)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: BMNH 21.1 .1.85, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at Sunchal (23.57° S, 65.00° W; 1200 m) in the Sierra de Santa Barbara , Jujuy province, Argentina .

SYNONYMS: janetta Thomas, 1926.

DISTRIBUTION: Thylamys sponsorius occurs along the foothills and eastern slopes of the Andes at recorded elevations from about 500 m to over 3700 m in southern Bolivia (Tarija) and northwestern Argentina (Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán, Catamarca) ( Giarla et al., 2010: fig. 9).

REMARKS: For an emended morphological description, measurement data, and comparisons with congeneric taxa, see Giarla et al. (2010). Phylogenetic analyses of multilocus sequence datasets ( Giarla et al., 2010; Díaz-Nieto et al., 2016a; Amador and Giannini, 2016) consistently recover Thylamys sponsorius and T. venustus as sister taxa. Morphological analyses of sequenced specimens suggest that these closely related species are primarily distinguished by size, although no single measurement is diagnostic ( Giarla et al., 2010).