Mus musculoides Temminck, 1853

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 625

Mus musculoides Temminck, 1853 . Esquisses Zool. sur la Côte de Guine, p. 161.

TYPE LOCALITY: West Africa, "Côte de Guine."

DISTRIBUTION: Subsaharan Africa (including Ethiopia and Somalia) southward to contact with M. minutoides .

SYNONYMS: bella , enclavae, gallarum, gondokorae, grata , marica , paulina, pelila, soricoides , sungarae, sybilia, vicina.

COMMENTS: Subgenus Nannomys . Whether the samples reflect only one or a complex of species is unresolved. For example, grata (or gratus ) is often listed as a separate species (Hatt, 1940«; Hollister, 1919); Petter and Matthey, 1975). Unresolved also is the geographic distribution of M. musculoides , and the nature of the biological relationship between it and M. minutoides . The considerable chromosoal variation among samples from West Africa was documented by Jotterand (1972) and JotterandBellomo (1984, 1986) under the identification of minutoides / musculoides , a label that reflects current understanding of specific limits in this complex.

Neither Yalden et al. (1976) nor Rupp (1980) recorded M. musculoides from Ethiopia, but we have seen many specimens from that country (in the British Museum and the Field Museum of Natural History).