Pachycephala meeki Hartert

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 44

Pachycephala meeki Hartert

Pachycephala meeki Hartert, 1898d: 15 (Rossel Island, Louisiade Archipelago).

Now Pachycephala monacha meeki Hartert, 1898 . See Coates, 1990: 217, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 448–449, Dickinson, 2003: 478, and Boles, 2007: 428–429.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 659235 , adult male, collected on Yela (5 Rossel) Island, 11.20S, 154.10E ( PNG, 1984), Louisiade Archipelago , Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, on 27 January 1898, by Albert S. Meek (no. 1299). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Hartert did not designate a type in the original description or say how many specimens he examined, nor was additional information provided when he reported on Meek’s entire 1898 Rossel Island collection ( Hartert, 1899a: 77). Later, in his list of Rothschild types, Hartert (1920a: 445) listed as the type of P. meeki the specimen bearing Meek’s unique field number 1299, thereby designating it the lectotype. Paralectotypes in AMNH are AMNH 659233, 659234, 659236–659250. AMNH 156436, collected by Meek on Rossel on 12 March, 1898, and exchanged to AMNH by J.H. Fleming (no. 20352) of Toronto, is possibly also a paralectotype of meeki . Because the Rothschild Collection was never cataloged by Rothschild and because Hartert in this case did not list or give the number of specimens in his type series, it is impossible to know whether Hartert actually had this specimen in hand when he described meeki . Fleming purchased his specimens from the dealer Gerrard, and it is not clear whether Rothschild selected his Meek specimens and sent the remainder to Gerrard to sell (for Meek) before or after they were studied by Hartert. See LeCroy and Peckover (1998: 227) for a discussion of this problem with regard to Meek’s Misima Island specimens.

Mayr (1967: 35) included meeki as a subspecies of his very broad species P. rufiventris . Coates (1990: 217) and Boles (2007: 428) treated it as a subspecies of the species P. leucogastra , keeping P. monacha as a separate species. See Schodde and Mason (1999: 448–449) for a discussion of species limits in the superspecies rufiventris . Dickinson (2003: 478) included meeki as a subspecies in the allospecies P. monacha (including leucogastra ).