Updated Global Mammal Checklist – June 2019
Yes, its the most wonderful time of year once again. My bike had an argument with a New York pot hole 2 weeks ago and I fractured three ribs. And that meant no weekend in North Dakota. Instead I spent the time feeling sorry for myself and updating my global mammal checklist with the latest IUCN redlist data. My last update was a year ago.
There have been quite a lot of changes and they are all listed in the worksheet “Changes Over Time”: scroll down to the heading “changes since version 6 (at June 2019)” to see the full list.
The IUCN have been busy adding species, including a lot of (fairly obscure) rodents. Perhaps the most notable changes – at least in how they might relate to people’s own lifelists – are:
- IUCN have revised the Saki Monkeys to include a bunch of new species following this paper Marsh, L.K. 2014. A taxonomic revision of the saki monkeys, Pithecia Desmarest, 1804. Neotropical Primates 21(1): 1-163
- The Four-striped Grass Mice (aka Zebra Mice) of Africa – Rhabdomys pumilus – have been split 4 ways. Three species in South Africa and one in East Africa. So, for example, the species around Kimberley is now R. bechuanae, while that in West Coast National Park is R. pumilus. That was my only new mammal from the IUCN’s changes
I have also added a few species that I noticed in various papers and fieldguides, and which the IUCN has yet to recognise, including:
Quenda, Isoodon fusciventer
Selangor Silvered Langur, Trachypithecus selangorensis
Nicaraguan Deer Mouse, Peromyscus nicaraguae
Fremont’s Squirrel, Tamiasciurus fremonti
Mogollon Vole, Microtus mogollonensis
Northern Mountain Viscacha, Lagidium peruanum
Japanese Racoon Dog, Nyctereutes viverrinus
Mediterranean Hare, Lepus mediterrananeus
These are all species I have seen so I have a bit of an interest in making sure they existg.! I suspect some of them are be a bit dodgy – eg Japanese Racoon Dog. I welcome people’s opinions on any that are so very dodgy they should be deleted.
All of the deviations between the redlist and my list are listed in the worksheet “Divergences from the IUCN list”. But really there is very little difference – just 70 species or so.
Thank you also to a few people who took the time to send in corrections, additions and deletions to the list since the last time, including Paul Carter. All mistakes are my own (or the IUCN’s).
27 Comments
-
tomeslice
Completely regardless of the mammal checklist update (for which I have no opinion) – feel better man! At your age it’s not trivial to be able to recover from this kind of an injury ;-P
I’m totally kidding, obviously, about the second part of the sentence.Looking forward to meeting up again in the future in search of some cool mammals!
Cheers,
Tomer-
-
tomeslice
Haha!
Good thing you’re not coming with us to Tawau… From the way people have been talking about it, it sounds harder than climbing Mt. Everest! I will have to give a full udpate about how difficult it really is 🙂
(and on that note – I’m really excited – just 3 months away from the longest and most intense mammal watching trip I’ve ever taken!)-
-
tomeslice
It’s 19 nights full-on mammal watching with the group, split between Tawau, Kinabatang, Danum Valley, Deramakot (10 nights!) and Mt. Kinabalu.
I’m going to be getting to Tawau a night early, so that’s 20 nights altogehter, and at the end of the trip I have 3 more nights in Singapore.So it can turn into 23 nights of mammal watching. But in Singapore I’m planning on doing a lot of sightseeing. But I do want to try to look for the pangolin that 3 people have already seen in the exact same place, and some otters which should be feasible, I suppose.
-
-
-
-
-
Venkat Sankar
Jon, I think you’ve graduated to a new level of mammal watcher. When you can’t be in the field, you’re scouring the scientific literature for potential splits to add to your list :p
Seriously though, I don’t buy the saki paper either. Their methods were entirely just morphological comparisons, which have proven inadequate to define species on their own time and again. We need some genetics, or data from intergrade zones.
If we standardized this paper’s methodology to all mammals, there would probably be 10,000 Peromyscus…
-
Jon Hall
Ha ha – if I can’t get to the new mammmals, then they will have to come to me. This morning I have managed to persuade myself that I must have seen a Goeldi’s Monkey in 2007 at Palmari Reserve in the western Amazon. I saw a small Tamarin-like monkey with an all black face that I didn’t ID at the time. OK, so if the Saki paper is no good, what is the correct Saki taxonomy do you think?
-
Venkat Sankar
Jon, I noticed that sighting when I read that report some time ago and wondered if it might be a Goeldi’s too… The description does fit well, as you say and they hang around tamarin troops usually.
This passage really captures my issue with the paper: “Since the designation of subspecies is vague and has been assigned in many cases arbitrarily to describe the diversity of Neotropical primates, I have elected to elevate all Pithecia to full species status until evidence is provided to delineate them further.” I think the author has abandoned the concept of subspecies, ecotype etc. to essentially assign every geographical and color morph found over the last 150 years as species…
I’d say just keep the old taxonomy of monachus, aequatorialis, irrorata, pithecia, etc until someone comes up with something better that is supported by more lines of evidence beyond just “it looks a bit different and some rivers separate it.”
-
-
-
Vladimir Dinets
I have just 5 saki species in my checklist: aequatorialis, albicans, irrorata (syn. vanzolinii, mittermeieri, rylandsi, pissinattii), monachus (syn. milleri), and pithecia (syn. chrysocephala). Everything else is vanity and vexation of spirit.
-
Vladimir Dinets
Also, has Lepus mediterraneus split proposal been published? I can’t find anything. It is a subspecies of L. europaeus which itself is a recent offshoot of L. capensis complex, so I’ll be very surprised if it’s valid.
-
Vladimir Dinets
BTW, there was a conference talk yesterday presenting conclusive data on island fox not being a valid species. They also found the Yukatan subspecies to be deeply divergent and probably deserving a species status.
-
Jon Hall
thanks Vladamir and Venkat – you will be pleased to learn I have gone back to a 5 Saki universe .. with tears in my eyes as I lose 4 species … and have listed the others as subspecies. Lepus meditarraneus is included in a new book on the mammals of morocco that is in French. This paper is given as a reference for that species being included… too complicated for me to understand but page 318 seems to have a relevant sentence at least. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6474017_Mitochondrial_CR-1_Variation_in_Sardinian_Hares_and_Its_Relationships_with_Other_Old_World_Hares_Genus_Lepus
-
Vladimir Dinets
That’s way too premature. Hares are currently the most complex problem in mammalian phylogenetics, it is already known that mtDNA-based approaches don’t work, and it’s going to be a while until things are sorted out, if ever. For now the only thing you can be certain about is that L. europaeus, L. tolai (a. k. a. “Asian L. capensis”), and L. macrotis (of NW Africa) are not conspecific with L. capensis sensu stricto. Here’s the best recent paper; note that mtDNA tree makes no sense whatsoever. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0229-8.pdf?origin=ppub
-
Vladimir Dinets
BTW, note that L. coreanus is a subspecies of L. mandshuricus: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790318304834
-
Vladimir Dinets
Here’s an update on birch mice: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-017-9409-6
Valid species are Sicista caudata, S. concolor (=leathemi=weigoldi), S. tianshanica, S. zhetysuica, S. caucasica, S. kluchorica, S. kazbegica, S. armenica, S. napaea (=tschingistauca), S. pseudonapaea, S. betulina (=montana=norvegica=taigica=strandi), S. subtilis (=severtzovi=cimlanica=sibirica=vaga), S. trizona (=transylvanica), and S. loriger. There are probably a few undescribed species in China. -
Vladimir Dinets
Bushbucks are one species, not two. https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article-abstract/100/4/1144/5514334?redirectedFrom=fulltext
-
Vladimir Dinets
Myotis nattereri spilt: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330772746_Two_New_Cryptic_Bat_Species_within_the_Myotis_nattereri_Species_Complex_Vespertilionidae_Chiroptera_from_the_Western_Palaearctic
To summarize it, bats in southern Spain are M. escalerae, those in N Africa are M. zenatius, in northern Spain, southern France in Italy M. crypticus, and north of the Alps it’s M. nattereri. There’s yet another possible split in Corsica.
-
Vladimir Dinets
Meanwhile, Neotropical rabbits continue to multiply like… yes, rabbits. https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyz126
-
Vladimir Dinets
African grass rats are the continent’s most charismatic mammals. I often hear from people about to travel there “Forget those boring cats and ungulates, we want to see grass rats!” So here’s a new review of the genus, particularly Ethiopian taxa. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333399045_Diversity_and_evolution_of_African_Grass_Rats_Muridae_Arvicanthis_-From_radiation_in_East_Africa_to_repeated_colonization_of_northwestern_and_southeastern_savannas
-
Vladimir Dinets
There is a proposal to split Nelson’s pocket mouse into 3 species: https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jmammal/gyz130/5571629?redirectedFrom=fulltext
-
Vladimir Dinets
Nelson’s pocket mouse 3-way split: https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jmammal/gyz130/5571629?redirectedFrom=fulltext
It’s not on sci-hub yet so I asked the corr. author for a PDF; can share it if I get it. -
Vladimir Dinets
Got the PDF. The proposed taxonomy is as follows:
C. nelsoni: El Salado Basin, which means all of the range S of Torreon, except Sierra Madre Occidental foothills. This includes the range of C. lineatus which is tentatively synonymized with this one.
C. collis collis: TX and NM.
C. collis mapimiensis: E Chihuahua, W Coahuila, and NE Durango.
C. durangae: along the E foothills of Sierra Madre Occidental from far S Chihuahua to far S Durango, and also Ciudad Durango area.
The three species look the same but are fully allopatric. -
Vladimir Dinets
Squirrels of Taiwan are Callosciurus finlaysonii rather than C. erythraeus, and might be an ancient introduction. The limits of these two species in Indochina also need correction. https://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg/app/uploads/2019/01/RBZ-2019-0037.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1mlsrF9AvIg5QIY4uXxEu6v2Q4RtBgVXWc0v3wMODto1cGpjQDbj77NJ0
-
Vladimir Dinets
Rhinolophus andamanensis (with obvious distribution) split from R. affinis: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213562&type=printable
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Vladimir Dinets
The saki paper is total BS.