Broadbentia flava assimilis 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 : 79-80

Broadbentia flava assimilis Mathews

Broadbentia flava assimilis Mathews, 1924: 562 (near Cairns, North Queensland).

Now from an area of intergradation between Lichenostomus f. flavus and L. f. addendus. See Schodde and Mason, 1999: 239, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 602.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 695705 , adult male, collected at Cairns , 16.51S, 145.43E (Times Atlas), Queensland, Australia, in July 1911, by P. Schraeder. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews named assimilis in volume 11, part 9, p. 562 of his Birds of Australia, which was published on 22 December 1924 (date on wrapper in AMNH Library, also Stone, 1927: 440). Mathews (1930: 783) himself first miscited the publication date as 1925 and various authors, including Salomonsen (1967: 373) have followed this citation. Mathews had a single specimen from Cairns collected in July 1911; it does not bear a Mathews or a Rothschild type label, but on the Rothschild Collection label, printed ‘‘Ex. coll. G.M. Mathews,’’ Mathews has written ‘‘Figured.’’ The specimen was figured in Mathews (1924: pl. 541, opp. p. 562, right fig., text p. 562), where it is described and said to be the type of assimilis. An AMNH type label has been added. I did not find this specimen listed in Mathews’ catalog and he may have received it after he no longer entered specimens. There are four

additional Mathews specimens collected by Schraeder in August 1908 at Cairns, the only location mentioned in the description. These are paratypes: males, AMNH 695706 (Mathews no. 3290), AMNH 695707 (3289) ; females, AMNH 695708 (3288), AMNH 695709 (3287) .

See Joseph and Wilke (2007) for a comparison of apparent Pleistocene population expansion and mitochondrial DNA diversity in Lichenostomus virescens .