Beautiful fat-tailed pouch rat
| Beautiful fat-tailed pouch rat | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Thylamys pulchellus | ||||||||||||
| ( Cabrera , 1934) |
The beautiful fat- tailed rat ( Thylamys pulchellus ) occurs in northern Argentina in the provinces of Catamarca , Chaco , Santiago del Estero and San Juan .
description
The animals reach a head trunk length of 6.2 to 9.6 cm and have a 7.9 to 10.8 cm long tail. The tail is usually 120% of the length of the head. The animals are gray-brown in color and are significantly lighter on the sides of the body, face, around the eyes and on the cheeks than on the back and the top of the head. As is common with fat-tailed rats, the hair is banded with three or four different color zones. The 7 to 8 mm long hair on the center back has a gray base followed by a dark brown zone, then a cream colored area and dark tips. The eyes are surrounded by narrow dark rings that extend far forward towards the nose, but do not reach it. The peritoneum is cream-colored. The ears are large, round and hairless. Front and rear paws are small and whitish. The tail, which is used to store fat, can reach a diameter of 6 to 7 mm. It is brownish on the top and whitish on the underside. The females do not have a pouch. The number of teats is unknown. The karyotype of the beautiful fat-tailed rat consists of a chromosome set of 2n = 14 chromosomes (FN = 20).
Habitat and way of life
The beautiful fat-tailed rat lives in the dry Chaco , in grassland, as well as in dry forests and secondary forests , which are dominated by Aspidosperma quebracho-blanco , Schinopsis lorentzii and Prosopis species as trees. So far, nothing is known about their diet, their activity patterns and their reproductive biology.
Systematics
The beautiful fat-tailed rat was first described in 1934 by the Argentine zoologist Ángel Cabrera Latorre under the name Marmosa janetta pulchella , i.e. it was assigned as a subspecies to another species that is no longer considered valid today. Terra typica is Robles in the province of Santiago del Estero. Today the beautiful fat-tailed rat is an independent species and belongs to the genus of the fat- tailed rat ( Thylamys ). Within the genus Thylamys , the beautiful fat- tailed-rat , together with the pampas-fat-tail-rat ( Thylamys citellus ) and the Chaco-fat-tail-rat ( Thylamys pusillus ), form a clade (Chaco-clade) of closely related species.
status
The IUCN lists the beautiful fat-tailed-pouch rat as safe. It has a relatively large range and is likely to be numerous.
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d e Diego Astúa: Family Didelphidae (Opossums). in Don E. Wilson , Russell A. Mittermeier : Handbook of the Mammals of the World - Volume 5. Monotremes and Marsupials. Lynx Editions, 2015, ISBN 978-84-96553-99-6 . Page 177 a. 178.
- ↑ R. Eduardo Palma, Dusan Boric Bargetto, Pablo Jayat, David A. Flores et a .: Molecular phylogenetics of mouse opossums: new findings on the phylogeny of Thylamys (Didelphimorphia, Didelphidae). Zoologica Scripta 43 (3): 217-234 January 2014, PDF
- ↑ Thylamys pulchellus in the Red List of Threatened Species of the IUCN 2016. Posted by: Flores, D. & Teta, P., 2016. Retrieved on March 22, 2020.