Melidectes fuscus gilliardi Salomonsen

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 : 132

Melidectes fuscus gilliardi Salomonsen

Melidectes fuscus gilliardi Salomonsen, 1966a: 10 (Mt. Wilhelm, Bismarck Range, 11,000 feet altitude, east-central New Guinea).

Now Melidectes fuscus fuscus (De Vis, 1897) . See Salomonsen, 1967: 416, Diamond, 1972: 389– 390, Coates, 1990: 256–258, and Higgins et al., 2008: 611.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 705793 , adult male, collected on Mount Wilhelm , 11,000 ft, 05.45S, 145.00E (PNG, 1984), Bismarck Mountains, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, on 7 June 1950, by E. Thomas Gilliard.

COMMENTS: Salomonsen cited the AMNH number of the holotype in the original description and gave the range of gilliardi as the Bismarck Mountains . This would include various expedition camps on the southern slopes of Mount Wilhelm in June 1950. Other mountains on which Gilliard made collections in 1950 and 1952 were not part of the Bismarck Range. Paratypes are: AMNH 705794–705796 , males, collected 7–11 June 1950 ; AMNH 705799–705801 , females, collected 8–14 June 1950 ; AMNH 802702 , female, collected 8 June 1950 ; and AMNH 802703 , male?, collected 10 June 1950. AMNH 705797 was sent to AM in 1953 and would not have been available to Salomonsen when he worked at AMNH in the early 1960s .

Diamond (1972: 389–390) synonymized gilliardi with M. f. fuscus . Coates (1990: 256–258) included this species in the genus Melionyx . See Mayr and Gilliard (1954) for a report on Gilliard’s 1950 and 1952 expeditions.