Philemon corniculatus ellioti Mathews

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 128-129

Philemon corniculatus ellioti Mathews

Philemon corniculatus ellioti Mathews, 1912a: 423 (Mount Elliot, North Queensland).

Now Philemon corniculatus corniculatus (Latham, 1790) . See Salomonsen, 1967: 412, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 292–293, Dickinson, 2003: 437, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 682–683.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 696889 , adult male, collected on Mount Elliot , 19.30S, 147.00E (Times Atlas), Queensland, Australia, on 1 December 1907, by Wilfred Stalker (no. 318). From the Mathews Collection (no. 3423) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews cited his catalog number of the holotype in the original description, giving the range of the form as ‘‘North Queensland.’’ The holotype bears Mathews and Rothschild type labels and Stalker’s original label, the number ‘‘818’’ on the reverse referring to the number of this species in Mathews (1908). This was the single specimen collected by Stalker in the vicinity of Inkerman (see Ingram, 1908: 478), and was the only specimen in Mathews’ possession when ellioti was named. It is the male described, but not figured, in Mathews (1925a: 110). Two of Mathews’ specimens collected at Cairns and on the Barron River in 1884 by T.H. Bowyer Bower were not cataloged by Mathews until 1913, after the publication of ellioti.

Schodde and Mason (1999: 293) discussed the type locality of nominate P. corniculatus and designated a neotype, with type locality on the Cape York Peninsula. The holotype of ellioti is from near Townsville, and within the range of P. c. corniculatus , close to, but not from within, the zone of intergradation shown by Schodde and Mason (1999: 292) contra Dickinson (2003: 437) and Higgins et al. (2008: 682).