An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae)
Author
Voss, Robert S.
text
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History
2022
2022-04-04
2022
455
1
77
https://bioone.org/journals/bulletin-of-the-american-museum-of-natural-history/volume-455/issue-1/0003-0090.455.1.1/An-Annotated-Checklist-of-Recent-Opossums-Mammalia-Didelphidae/10.1206/0003-0090.455.1.1.full
journal article
10.1206/0003-0090.455.1.1
0003-0090
Marmosa
(
Micoureus
)
constantiae
Thomas, 1904
TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY:
BMNH 3.7
.7.157, the
holotype
by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult male collected at “Chapada” (=
Santa Ana de Chapada
:
15.43° S
,
55.75° W
;
800 m
),
Mato Grosso state
,
Brazil
.
SYNONYMS:
domina
Thomas, 1920;
mapiriensis
Tate, 1931
.
DISTRIBUTION: As currently recognized (see Remarks),
Marmosa constantiae
occurs from the foothills of the Andes (below about
1100 m
) in eastern
Peru
and eastern
Bolivia
eastward across Amazonia and the Cerrado to central
Brazil
; mtDNA sequencing results (see Remarks) suggest that the range of this species does not extend north of the Amazon nor east of the Xingu (
Silva et al., 2019
: fig. 5; Voss et al., 2020: fig. 2).
REMARKS: The name
Marmosa constantiae
has long been misapplied to a superficially similar congener,
M. rapposa
, that also occurs in Mato Grosso and eastern
Bolivia
(see below). Previous reports of
M. constantiae
from
Argentina
(
Flores
et al., 2007
) and
Paraguay
(
de la Sancha et al., 2012
; Smith and Owen, 2015) likewise appear to have been based on specimens of
M. rapposa
. As recognized by
Silva et al. (2019)
and Voss et al. (2020),
M. constantiae
is geographically variable in coloration: whereas Cerrado populations have pale dorsal fur, broadly self-yellow underparts, and parti- colored (white-tipped) tails, rainforest populations are darker dorsally and have mostly gray-based ventral fur and all-dark tails (
Voss et al., 2019
). The rainforest phenotype of
M. constantiae
is difficult to distinguish morphologically from
M. germana
(a distantly related congener that occurs north of the Amazon; Voss and Giarla, 2021), so currently recognized range limits are based, in part, on sequencing results rather than examined specimens. Phylogenetic analyses of multilocus sequence data recover
M. constantiae
and
M. demerarae
as sister taxa (Voss et al., 2020), and comparisons of sequenced specimens suggest that these taxa are morphologically diagnosable (
Silva et al., 2019
).