Chironectes Illiger, 1811

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 : 33

Genus Chironectes Illiger, 1811

TYPE SPECIES: Lutra minima Zimmermann, 1780 , by monotypy.

SYNONYMS: Gamba Liais, 1872 ; Memina G. Fischer, 1814 .

REMARKS: See Voss and Jansa (2009) for an emended generic description. This genus contains only a single species, the water opossum, Chironectes minimus . Although the results of morphometric analyses have sometimes been interpreted as evidence for multiple species of water opossums (Damasceno and Astúa, 2016; Cerqueira and Weber, 2017), the remarkable genetic similarity among specimens collected at widely scattered localities from Central America to southeastern Brazil suggests recent range expansion or widespread gene flow (Voss and Jansa, 2018).