Philander melanurus (Thomas, 1899)

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 : 39

Philander melanurus (Thomas, 1899)

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: BMNH 97.11 .7.61, the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at Paramba (0.82° N, 78.35° W; 700 m), Imbabura province, Ecuador .

SYNONYMS: fuscogriseus J.A. Allen, 1900; grisescens J.A. Allen, 1901; melantho Thomas, 1923.

DISTRIBUTION: Based on sequenced specimens, Philander melanurus occurs in western Ecuador, western and inter-Andean Colombia, and Panama (Voss et al., 2018: fig. 3), but it seems likely that the species’s range also extends northward into Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and possibly Honduras.

REMARKS: Morphological traits that distinguish this species from other congeners formerly synonymized with Philander opossum remain to be adequately documented. Phylogenetic analyses of multilocus sequence data (Voss et al., 2018) suggest that this species is the sister taxon of P. vossi , another trans-Andean endemic.