King mill rat
| King mill rat | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Mylomys rex | ||||||||||||
| ( Thomas , 1906) |
The king mill rat ( Mylomys rex ) is a barely researched rodent species from the genus of the African furrow tooth rats ( Mylomys ). This taxon, which is endemic to Ethiopia, is known from only one specimen.
features
The type specimen , an adult male in which the skull is missing, has the following size specifications: The head-trunk length is 212 mm, the tail length 175 mm, the hind foot length 35 mm and the ear length 24 mm. The back fur is speckled with sandy brown and more reddish around the rump. The peritoneum is blue-white with a sharp demarcation between the back and the abdomen. The long tail is roughly curled. The front feet only have three functional toes.
Habitat and way of life
The king mill rat was discovered in a damp forest at an altitude of 1,800 m. Nothing is known about their way of life.
Status and system
The IUCN classifies the king mill rat in the category "insufficient data" ( data deficient ). It was described as Arvicanthis rex by Oldfield Thomas in 1906 . Thomas noted that it is believed to be a large form of the Harrington rats ( Desmomys ), a genus that has sometimes been considered a synonym or subgenus of the furrow-tooth brook rats ( Pelomys ). For the next 90 years this species was referred to as Pelomys rex in the scientific literature . In 1993, Guy Musser and Michael D. Carleton pointed out that the king mill rat belongs to the genus Mylomys . However, the separation from the Dybowskis mill rat ( Mylomys dybowskii ), which occurs in West and Central Africa, has been questioned and both taxa have been synonymous with each other. In 2005, the two authors restored the species status on the grounds that the king mill rat is larger than Dybowski's mill rat and occurs in tropical forests. Musser and Carleton question the type locality , the Charada Forest in the Ethiopian province of Kaffa , but the type label clearly bears the handwriting of the collector Peter Zaphiro, who collected the holotype during an expedition to southern Ethiopia between 1904 and 1905. There is a large gap between the known distribution areas of the Königsmühlen rat and the Dybowskis mill rat and so far too little data is available to correctly assess the taxonomic status of the Königsmühlen rat.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Musser, GG and Carleton, MD 1993. Family Muridae. In: DE Wilson and DA Reeder (eds), Mammal species of the world: A taxonomic and geographic reference, pp. 501-736. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, USA.
- ↑ Musser, GG and Carleton, MD 2005. Superfamily Muroidea. In: DE Wilson and DA Reeder (eds), Mammal Species of the World: a geographic and taxonomic reference, pp. 894-1531. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, USA.
literature
- Derek W. Yalden: Mylomys rex . In: Jonathan Kingdon, Thomas M. Butynski, David CD Happold, Meredith Happold (Eds.): Mammals of Africa. Volume 3: Rodents, Hares, and Rabbits. Bloomsbury, London et al. 2013, ISBN 978-140-812-253-2 , pp. 501-502.
- Oldfield Thomas: XLI. — New mammals collected in North-East Africa by Mr. Zaphiro, and presented to the British Museum by WN McMillan, Esq In: The Annals and magazine of natural history; zoology, botany, and geology being a continuation of the Annals combined with Loudon and Charlesworth's Magazine of Natural History. Series 7, Volume 18, 1906. p. 304
Web links
- Mylomys rex inthe IUCN 2013 Red List of Threatened Species . Posted by: Leonid Lavrenchenko, 2008. Retrieved February 1, 2014.