Taxonomy news

1. A new genus of rodents with three species described from Choco region. Must be rare: I’ve done a lot of trapping in Mindo where one of these occurs but never got it.
2. Marmosops pinheiroi split into three species.
3. Turns out there was a new jackrabbit split that I missed. Occurs on the coast N of Tampico.
4. The recently split Persian water vole apparently occurs in Israel but is invisible.
5. Speaking of water voles, a recent paper found Arvicola monticola, A. terrestris and A. scherman to be synonyms of A. amphibius. But another paper found A. monticola to be a valid species. So the current list of species is A. amphibius, A. monticola, A. sapidus, A. italicus and A. persicus.
6. The second volume of Mammals of Taiwan has just been published (Lin, L.-K., Oshida, T. and Motokawa, M. (2020). Mammals of Taiwan. Volume 2. Rodentia. Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan. 165 pp.). It covers rodents. Taiwanese Petaurista petaurista/philippensis is split as P. grandis, while Taiwanese P. alborufus is split as P. lena (both long-anticipated splits). The book is not available online but here is a review with a summary; one thing it points out is that Taiwanese harvest mice belong to recently split Chinese Micromys erythrotis rather than Palearctic M. minutus. Note also that Tamiops maritimus has been synonymized with T. swinhoei; it is unclear if Taiwanese T. formosanus belongs to the same species.