Leptodesmus carneus Saussure, 1859

John Hollier, Edmund Schiller & Nesrine Akkari, 2017, An annotated list of the Diplopoda described by Aloïs Humbert alone and with Henri de Saussure, and the Diplopoda from Saussure’s Mexico expedition, Revue suisse de Zoologie 124 (2), pp. 203-224 : 206-207

carneus Saussure, 1859a: 324 [ Polydesmus (Leptodesmus) ].

Brésil. Unspecified series.

Saussure (1860) implied that the original description was based on a single ♂ specimen from Bahia in Brazil, although the phrasing is ambiguous because it refers to an illustration. Saussure & Humbert (1872) described the ♀, giving the locality as Rio de Janeiro. Carl (1903) stated that he studied two ♂ “Originalexamplare,” describing and illustrating the gonopod. The MHNG collection has two specimens in alcohol under the name Leptodesmus carneus , with a vial containing part of the head of a third specimen, a gnathochilarium, a pair of gonopods and a ♀ second pair of legs. Although there are no original data labels, these are presumably the syntypes referred to by Carl. The NHMW collection contains a non-type ♀ specimen collected by Tóth in 1864 in Rio de Janeiro (Inventory number 3292, Acquisition number 1866.I.140) and identified by Humbert and Saussure. This specimen was presumably the one used for the description of the ♀ in Humbert & Saussure (1872). L. carneus was designated the type species of Leptodesmus by Pocock (1909: 162), but the genus is poorly defined ( Hoffman, 2012).

Leptodesmus carneus Saussure, 1859