A revision of the didelphid marsupial genus Marmosa Part 4 species of the Alstoni Group (subgenus Micoureus)

Title Variants

Alternative: Species of the Alstoni Group

Related Titles

Series: American Museum novitates, number 3983

By

Voss, Robert S. , author

Giarla, Thomas C. , author
Jansa, Sharon A. , author

Type

Book

Material

Published material

Publication info

New York, NY, American Museum of Natural History, [2021]

Notes

Caption title.

"December 8, 2021."

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In this report, the fourth of a revisionary series on mouse opossums (Marmosa), we treat the members of a monophyletic group of trans-Andean taxa that include M. alstoni (Allen, 1900); M. nicaraguae Thomas, 1905; and M. adleri, a new species. Although cytochrome b sequence divergence values among these species are substantially lower than distances commonly observed among other congeners, members of the Alstoni Group are strikingly unlike one another in morphological traits. We conjecture that rapid phenotypic divergence accompanied the Pleistocene radiation of an ancestral lineage that entered Central America as a late participant in the Great American Biotic Interchange. Additional undescribed species of the Alstoni Group seem likely to exist based on the evidence at hand, and we emphasize the need for renewed collecting in Central America, which has long been neglected by mammalian biodiversity researchers.

Subjects

Central America , Classification , Marmosa , Marmosa adleri , Morphology , Opossums

Call Number

QL1 .A436 no. 3983 2021

Language

English

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1206/3983.1
OCLC: 1287940149