Halmaturus crassipes Ramsay, 1876a

Parnaby, Harry E., Ingleby, Sandy & Divljan, Anja, 2017, Type Specimens of Non-fossil Mammals in the Australian Museum, Sydney, Records of the Australian Museum 69 (5), pp. 277-420 : 335

Halmaturus crassipes Ramsay, 1876a

Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S.W. (ser. 1) 1(2): 162. (July 1876).

Common name. Agile Wallaby.

Current name. Notamacropus agilis papuanus (Peters & Doria, 1875) , following Jackson & Groves (2015), who elevated Notamacropus from subgeneric rank.

Syntype. PA.1067 by subsequent determination. Male adult, partial “flat” skin, no skull, donated by Andrew Goldie. The only data in the original entry in the Palmer Register, apparently c. 1879, is “ Halmaturus crassipes , New Guinea donation Goldie mounted”, with “type” added subsequently, and no indication of the sex of the specimen. The whereabouts of the skull remains unknown .

Condition. Skin is in good condition with both manus, both pes and scrotum attached. The skin was previously a skin mount, which has been cut open and from which all filling has been removed.

Type locality. “Southern New Guinea ” (Ramsay), = Papua New Guinea.

Comments. Ramsay provides a description of an adult male skin and cleaned skull and a young female, and provides measurements for the male. Ramsay does not state the number of specimens that he examined but he notes that several young animals were initially obtained from Port Moresby by Broadbent and Petterd, and the adult male of his description was obtained from “southern New Guinea ” by Gouldie. [= A. Goldie]. An entry in the A Register for May 1876 (before numbers were assigned to specimens in the A Register) lists “1 Halmaturus new sp. Andrew Gouldie [sic] New Guinea ”, and the AM annual report for 1876 indicates that one specimen was prepared as a mount ( Ramsay, 1877h) but the lists of purchased specimens do not give a breakdown by species. The young female specimen described by Ramsay was not necessarily lodged in the AM Collection but could have belonged to a private collection such as his own or that of William Macleay.

PA.1067 is accompanied with a printed cardboard display card on which is printed “ Macropus agilis Gould, 1067 , A3642 A3648 (male, female and young) Type of Macropus crassipes Ramsay ”. The display card postdates Thomas (1888a) who synonymized Halmaturus crassipes with Macropus agilis . It is evident that PA.1067 was at one time set in a group display with the two A Registered specimens. Neither A3642 nor A3648 are part of Ramsay’s original series as both were purchased from Goldie in 1878 and registered that year.