Updated Mammal Checklist Now Available
I imagine many of you have already been affected by Covid-19, with cancelled trips, national lockdowns and the rest. Much more importantly I sincerely hope you, your friends and family are healthy and remain that way.
I should have been packing to go to China about now. And then I should have been packing to go to Costa Rica. Instead I have been updating my mammal checklist with the latest data from the IUCN and a few more bits and pieces. The latest spreadsheet – as at March 2020 – is here.
What are the main changes since the last update in June 2019?
Perhaps of most interest to people here are the primate changes. IUCN have added a few howler monkeys, a couple of red colobus monkeys, a couple of capuchins, the Skywalker Gibbons from China are now included, and they have split saddleback tamarins in multiple directions (this all seems largely in line with the Handbook of the Mammals of the World).
Other than that there are a ton of new bats, quite a few shrews and a few other bits and pieces. Again most, if not all, of these are included in the handbook.
I also added a few species that I expect the IUCN will include before too long, including several North American species following this paper.
All species on this list that are not on the IUCN list are highlighted in yellow and I added Redlist Status to the spreadsheet in case that is of interest.
Vladimir Dinets in particular has also been posting (here) with other changes that might be in the pipeline. It is very hard for me to keep up and to know which will eventually be accepted. But hopefully this updated checklist is a step in the right direction. And even if you cannot travel to see mammals maybe this new list will provide a few new ones.
Be well and stay safe.
Jon
4 Comments
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Jon Hall
THanks Michael – very helpful. I am adding fentoni, milleri and verrilli to my list for the next update. I bellieve that bondae has very recently been synomymised with currentium so that is a suprise to see it stilllthere. I cannot find anything about fluminensis or nigricans other than some ancient mentions and as these species were not used in the Handbook of the Mammals of the World I think I will wait to see what happens with those. Sorry about Taiwan and fingers crossed for Brazil!
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Vladimir Dinets
Red-type Lasiurus bats of SW Peru have just been described as L. arequipae: http://revista.ib.unam.mx/index.php/bio/article/view/3096/2089?fbclid=IwAR3PhsvJpRGvYfK_JgPK1SB3XrI6hufwagyXOyEVJMHc2D6c8GN4riSS2zY
I saw one under a bridge in Chiguata back in 2007. My life list keeps growing no matter if I travel or not 🙂 -
Vladimir Dinets
There is growing support for splitting Tursiops gephyreus. A new paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmor.21121
IUCN now has a separate page for it, probably preparing to recognize the split: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/134822416/135190824
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Michael Kessler
Thanks Jon! Yes, this is a good time to do the homework. My trip to Taiwan in May is cancelled and it looks as if the trip to Brazil in July will also not take place. That’s up to 100 new species that are not ging to happen anytome soon. Bummer …
Regarding your list, I take notice of a recently published paper on Molossus (Loueiro et al. 2020 Mol. Phyl. Evol. 143: 106690), which looks at species boundaries in Molossus mainly based on genetic data (but also with a lot of data on morphology, distributions, etc., with a taxonomic treatment of the new species circumscriptions; Livia Loureiro obviously has been working on this group for years and knows her stuff) and concludes that the genus contains 14 species (versus 8 in your list). These are:
M. alvarezi (Mexico to northern South America)
M. aztecus (Mexico to SE Brazil)
M. bondae (Central America to northwestern South America; Honduras to Ecuador and Venezuela)
M. coibensis (Mexico to SE Brazil)
M. currentium (central and southern South America; Argentina, Bolivia?, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay)
M. fentoni (northern South America)
M. fluminensis (split from M. rufus; southeastern Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay)
M. milerri (Greater Antilles)
M. molossus (Mexico to Argentina)
M. nigricans (split from M. rufus; North and Central America; Mexico to Panama)
M. pretiosus (Nicaragua to Brazil)
M. rufus (northern and central south America; Trinidad and Tobago to Bolivia)
M. sinaloae (Pacific slope of Mexico)
M. verrilli (Hispaniola)