Meliornis pyrrhoptera indistincta Mathews

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 140-141

Meliornis pyrrhoptera indistincta Mathews

Meliornis pyrrhoptera indistincta Mathews, 1912a: 414 (South Australia).

Now Phylidonyris pyrrhopterus halmaturinus (A.G. Campbell, 1906) . See Salomonsen, 1967: 426, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 309–310, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 666–667.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 692052 , adult male, collected in the Mount Lofty Range , 35.00S, 138.50E ( USBGN, 1957), South Australia, Australia, on 23 May 1910, by J.B. Cleland. From the Mathews Collection (no. 5565) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews cited his catalog number of the holotype in the original description and gave the range of the form as ‘‘ Victoria, South Australia.’’ Paratypes are specimens from those two states that were in Mathews’ collection before 31 January 1912, the publication date of indistincta . The following were found in Mathews’ catalog and are definitely paratypes: AMNH 692053 (Mathews no. 5566), female, Mount Lofty, 17 May 1910, by J.B. Cleland; AMNH 692054 (5946), female, Mount Lofty, 20 May 1911, by Cleland; AMNH 692055 (3316), sex?, Mount Lofty, 26 May 1897; AMNH 692060 (4970), male immature, Olinda, 1 February 1909, by L.G. Chandler (This is the specimen mentioned under mixta, above, as ‘‘described’’); AMNH 692071 (6273), female [male plumage], Lang Lang, 13 April 1908, by Howe (also a syntype of mixta). The following specimens are possible paratypes of indistincta , but I did not find them in Mathews’ catalog: AMNH 692057, female, Frankston, 29 September 1908, by Chandler; AMNH 692059, male, Beaconsfield, 11 June 1910, by Chandler; AMNH 692070, male, Lang Lang, 4 September 1908; and AMNH 692072, female [male plumage], Warburton, June 1903. The last three are also syntypes of Phylidonyris pyrroptera mixta Mathews (see above). Other specimens that had been in Mathews’ collection were either collected or cataloged after the publication date of indistincta or were not dated.

Salomonsen (1967: 426) recognized indistinctus; Schodde and Mason (1999: 309–310) included it in halmaturinus.