Monticola sharpei salomonseni Farkas, 1973

Mary, Croy, History, Bulletin Of The American Museum Of Natural, At, Central Park West, Street, Th, York, New & Ny, 2005, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 6. Passeriformes: Prunellidae, Turdidae, Orthonychidae, Timaliidae, Paradoxornithidae, Picathartidae, And Polioptilidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2005 (292), pp. 1-132 : 28

Monticola sharpei salomonseni Farkas

Monticola sharpei salomonseni Farkas, 1973: 147 (Sianaka forest, eastern Madagascar).

Now Monticola sharpei salomonseni Farkas, 1973 . See Goodman and Weigt, 2002.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 412287 , adult male, collected in the Sianaka forest , eastern Madagascar, in May 1929, on the Mission Zoologique Franco­Anglo­Américaine à Madagascar.

COMMENTS: The AMNH number of the holotype was cited in the original description. It is difficult to determine paratypes, as Farkas (1973: 147) did not list his specimens individually. However, he visited AMNH and had access to the specimens. He considered Monticola sharpei (G.R. Gray) a full species and synonymized M. imerina interioris Salomonsen with it, both being representatives of the large highland population. This left the the small lowland birds without a name, for which Farkas provided M. sharpei salomonseni . He referred to Salomonsen (1934) for wing measurements of salomonseni (which Salomonsen called ‘‘ sharpei ’’). Salomonsen (1934: 207, 212) listed specimen localities for ‘‘ sharpei ’’ and noted that the specimens on which he based his paper were in BMNH and MHNP and were collected on the 1929–1931 Mission Zoologique Franco­Anglo­Américaine; these specimens are paratypes of M. s. salomonseni Farkas. The remaining third of the specimens from that expedition are in AMNH and I found eight from the listed localities, with five additional ones from the type locality that had come to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. All of these would have been available to Farkas and are paratypes of salomonseni: AMNH 412285, 412286, 412288, and 580868–580872, all from Sianaka forest; AMNH 412276 and 412277, from Fanovana; and AMNH 412289–412291, from near Andapa. There may be others that Farkas considered specimens of salomonseni.

The holotype and paratypes AMNH 412285, 412286, and 412288 appear to have been acquired from Herschell­Chauvin during the 1929 –1931 Mission Zoologique ( Rand, 1936: 156), as they were cataloged with that collection but have only a rough paper label with minimal data. Rand said that most of Herschell­Chauvin’s material dated near the time of the expedition’s visit came from the Sianaka Forest in the vicinity of Fito and Didy. Carleton and Schmidt (1990: 9) discussed this locality and gave the coordinates as ca. 188059S, 488309E.

The various generic and specific treatments of these Madagascar rock­thrushes are summarized and the results of their molecular studies given by Goodman and Weigt (2002). Dickinson (2003: 688) recognized the genus Pseudocossyphus for sharpei and placed it in the subfamily Saxicolinae , family Muscicapidae .