Echidna corealis Krefft, 1872a

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 : 298

Echidna corealis Krefft, 1872a

The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser 14 (652): 808, col. 1. (28 December 1872).

Common name. Short-beaked Echidna .

Current name. Tachyglossus aculeatus aculeatus ( Shaw, 1792) , following Groves (2005a) and Jackson & Groves (2015), who consider that subspecies of aculeatus and associated names require taxonomic clarification.

Holotype. PA.389 by subsequent determination. Skin mount, skull in situ ( Figs 1–2), indeterminate sex. Purchased from J. A. Thorpe, entered in Palmer Register in c. 1878 as “ Echidna sp. ”

Condition. Skin mount in good condition, missing ventral tip of beak, small bald patch at midline of abdomen. X-ray images of the skin mount taken in 2013 revealed a complete skull and dentaries, with several fractures in the rostrum. All other skeletal elements are absent other than complete bones of all four limbs.

Type locality. Cape York, Qld, Australia.

Comments. Mahoney (1988) cites this specimen as the holotype. In the original account, Krefft states that this taxon was discovered by J. A. Thorpe. A receipt dated 16 February 1869 in theAMArchives ( AMS7 Letters Received, C:10.69.20) indicates that Thorpe received payment for “11 animals from Cape York ”. A subsequent annotation in 1910, evidently done during preparation of the X Register, determined that PA.389 was one of those specimens. PA.389 was not marked as a type by Palmer in the P Register.