Monodelphis (Monodelphis) touan (Shaw, 1800)

Voss, Robert S., 2022, An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (455), pp. 1-77 : 25

Monodelphis (Monodelphis) touan (Shaw, 1800)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: FMNH 21720 , the neotype (designated by Voss et al., 2001), consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at Cayenne (4.93° N, 52.33° W; near sea level), French Guiana .

SYNONYMS: touan Bechstein, 1800 ; touan Daudin (in Lacépède, 1802); tricolor Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, 1803.

DISTRIBUTION: As currently recognized, Monodelphis touan is known from French Guiana, Amapá, and eastern Pará (south of the Amazon and east of the Xingu, including Marajó Island) ( Pavan et al., 2012: fig. 6).

REMARKS: Although Monodelphis touan was treated as a subjective junior synonym of M. brevicaudata by Voss et al. (2001) and Pine and Handley (2008), these taxa were judged to be valid species by Pavan et al. (2012) based on coat-color differences and phylogenetic analyses of mtDNA sequence data. However, Husson (1978: 14) remarked on the difficulty of distinguishing M. touan from M. brevicauda due to the phenotypic intermediacy of Surinamese specimens, which were not included in Pavan et al.’s (2012) study. The population of M. touan that is south of the Amazon differs in pelage traits from the population on the north bank and was called “ Monodelphis [species D]” by Pine and Handley (2008), but representative sequences from these populations were not recovered as reciprocally monophyletic haplogroups by Pavan et al. (2012).