Melilestes megarhynchus brunneus 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 : 44-45

Melilestes megarhynchus brunneus Salomonsen

Melilestes megarhynchus brunneus Salomonsen, 1966a: 1 (Siwi, Arfak Mountains, New Guinea).

Now Melilestes megarhynchus megarhynchus (G.R. Gray, 1858) . See Gilliard and LeCroy, 1970: 22– 23, and Higgins et al., 2008: 630.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 294369 , adult male, collected at Siwi , 01.30S, 134.02E ( USBGN, 1982a), Arfak Mountains, Papua Province, Indonesia, on 2 May 1928, by Ernst Mayr (no. 355).

COMMENTS: Salomonsen gave the AMNH number of the holotype in the original description and defined the range as Misol and Salawati islands in the western Papuan Islands and the Vogelkop and Onin Peninsula in northwestern New Guinea. Specimens in AMNH from those areas are paratypes: AMNH 693689–693691 from Misol ; AMNH 693692 from Andai ; AMNH 693693 , 693694 from Mount Arfak ; AMNH 693695 from Mount Moari ; AMNH 693696 from Siwi ; and AMNH 693697–693700 from Kapaur .

Mayr’s 1928 expedition to New Guinea was jointly sponsored by L.C. Sanford for AMNH and Rothschild, and his collection was divided between the two museums, with a subset sent to MZB ( Hartert, 1930a: 18–

19). The Rothschild portion of the collection came to AMNH in 1932, when that collection was purchased. Salomonsen’s type series thus included both the Rothschild and AMNH portions of the collection, but he would not have seen any specimens sent to MZB unless he visited that collection.