Monodelphis (Microdelphys) americana (Muller, 1776)

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 : 21

Monodelphis (Microdelphys) americana

(Müller, 1776)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: No type material is known to exist. Monodelphis americana is based on a 17th-century description of a species observed in Brazil by the Dutch naturalist Marcgraf (Pine and Handley, 2008), so the type locality is often assumed to be Recife, the main Dutch settlement in Brazil ( Cabrera, 1958). Although the application of this name is not currently disputed, future taxonomic contingencies might require the designation of a neotype.

SYNONYMS: brasiliensis Erxleben, 1777; brasiliensis Daudin (in Lacépède, 1802); rubida Thomas, 1899 ; trilineata Lund, 1840; tristriata Illiger, 1815 ; umbristriata Miranda-Ribeiro, 1936.

DISTRIBUTION: Monodelphis americana is known from the right bank of the Tocantins in eastern Pará southward along the rainforested (or formerly rainforested) Atlantic coast of Brazil to Santa Catarina ; the range of this species also extends inland along gallery-forested rivers into the Cerrado (Pine and Handley, 2008: map 37).

REMARKS: See Duda and Costa (2015) for a morphological description, measurement data, and comparisons with Monodelphis iheringi , a superficially similar and closely related sympatric congener. The names brasiliensis, trilineata, and tristriata are all based, directly or indirectly, on the same 17th-century description authored by Marcgraf (Pine and Handley, 2008), so they are objective synonyms of M. americana . However, the names rubida and umbristriata are subjective synonyms based on specimens that exhibit ontogenetic pelage-color variants ( Pavan et al., 2014; Duda and Costa, 2015). Northern and southern cytochrome b haplogroups of M. americana differ by an average uncorrected sequence distance of 8.2% ( Pavan et al., 2014) and merit close taxonomic scrutiny.