Glironia venusta Thomas, 1912

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 : 9

Glironia venusta Thomas, 1912

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: BMNH 12.1 .15.7, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at Pozuzo (10.07° S, 75.53° W; 800 m), Pasco department, Peru .

SYNONYMS: aequatorialis Anthony, 1926; criniger Anthony, 1926.

DISTRIBUTION: Glironia venusta has been collected or observed at widely scattered rainforest localities throughout much of Amazonia, but it is also known to occur in tropical dry forest in eastern Bolivia (Santa Cruz) and southwestern Brazil (Mato Grosso). Noteworthy recent extensions of the geographic range as mapped by Díaz and Willig (2004: fig. 1) include records from southeastern Colombia ( Montenegro and Restrepo, 2018), eastern Brazil ( Ardente et al., 2013), and French Guiana (Sant and Catzeflis, 2018). Formerly thought to be a lowland species, G. venusta is now known to occur at elevations> 1500 m in the Andes ( Arguero et al., 2017).

REMARKS: The only molecular data available to assess the taxonomic status of nominal taxa currently regarded as synonyms of Glironia venusta were analyzed by Voss et al. (2019), who reported a trivial sequence difference (0.2%, uncorrected) between fragments of cytochrome b amplified from the holotypes of aequatorialis and criniger (from north of the Amazon in eastern Ecuador and northeastern Peru, respectively) but a much larger distance (ca. 6%) between those sequences and one from south of the Amazon in western Brazil. Unfortunately, no sequence data are currently available from eastern Amazonia. Measurements from five western Amazonian specimens were tabulated by Voss et al. (2019).