Echidna orientalis 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 : 402

Echidna orientalis Krefft, 1872a

The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser 14 (652): p. 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.

Type material. Type not designated and no suitable candidate specimen found in AM; whereabouts unknown .

Type locality. New South Wales: Krefft (1872a) specifically refers to a large individual “from this colony”, which is inferred to be NSW given that he regarded the Victorian form to be “ hystrix ” .

Comments. We have not found any entry in the Palmer or other registers that is registered as “orientalis”. We have not found any entry for an echidna in the Palmer Register that could have been Krefft’s original specimen, however it is likely that not all specimens were registered by Palmer. Krefft’s concept of four echidna species involved what he called the Tasmanian “ setosa ”, Southern, i.e. Victorian “ hystrix ”; Eastern “ orientalis ”, the common echidna of NSW, and the northern, or Cape York echidna “ corealis ”. Krefft provided a brief description of orientalis and mentions a large individual from NSW. The only measurements given by Krefft are for a skin “ 1 foot 9 inches total length, and 9 inches wide”, which is a large specimen that equals the size of the largest 20th century skin mount now in the collection.