Scoteinus orion aquilo Troughton, 1937c

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 : 399-400

Scoteinus orion aquilo Troughton, 1937c

Aust. Zool. 8(4): 278. (12 March 1937).

Common name. Broad-nosed Bat.

Current name. Scotorepens greyii (J. Gray, 1843) ; following Simmons (2005) and Jackson & Groves (2015). Status unresolved, but synonymized with S. greyii by most recent authors.

Holotype. PA.209 by original designation. Female adult, skull, body in alc., “Port Denison” from Mr Nobbs, registered in c. 1878. The year of collection is not recorded but is likely to be the 1860s. The only donations of bats listed from a Mr Nobbs during 1860–1879 in the specimens received from public donations section of the AM annual Trustees reports are “Two bats ( Scotophilus )” from Mr Thomas Nobbs in 1864 ( Krefft, 1865e), and “Three species of bats from Rockhampton” from “Mr Th. Nobbs” in 1865 ( Krefft, 1866c). Condition. Cranium missing left zygomatic arch and both auditory bullae; cranium and dentaries otherwise complete. Body in alc.: fur slip on ventral and dorsal surface, broken left forearm and hole in left wing membrane between forearm and 5th digit.

Type locality. Port Denison (= Bowen), north Qld, Australia.

Paratype. A.10630 by original designation. Female adult, skull ( Fig. 57 ), body in alc., Dawson River , near Rockhampton, coastal north Qld. G. Masters and G. Barnard, registered in October 1881. This specimen was possibly obtained from Coomooboolaroo Station, Dawson River, owned by the Barnard family where Masters was based while on a collecting trip. However, the A Register entry is ambiguous which is presumably why Troughton gave the locality simply as Dawson River. The entry of Dawson River against A.10630 in the Register is followed by Coomooboolaroo Station on the next line and it is unclear if this represents two localities or one locality applied to subsequent specimen entries. However, the specimen index card has Dawson River only.

Comments. Description based on two specimens. Recent authors assign this taxon to S. greyii , but its status remains confused as reflected by consignment by different authors to either S. orion , S. balstoni (e.g., Koopman, 1984) or S. greyii , underscoring the need for a complete revision of the genus. In the most comprehensive assessment of the genus, Kitchener & Caputi (1985), who provide detailed measurements of the holotype, considered greyii to be a complex of taxa. They were unsure whether to assign aquilo to S. sanborni , or to their concept of S. greyii . They noted that aquilo shared characters of both taxa (Kitchener & Caputi, 1985: 139), but they settled for synonymizing aquilo with S. greyii .

Figures

Figure 57. AM PA.209, holotype skull of Scoteinus orion aquilo Troughton, 1936c. (Photography by Sally Cowan).