A new species of Marmosops (Marsupialia, Didelphidae) from the Pakaraima Highlands of Guyana, with remarks on the origin of the endemic Pantepui mammal fauna

Related Titles

Series: American Museum novitates, no. 3778

By

Voss, Robert S.

Lim, Burton K.
Díaz-Nieto, Juan F.
Jansa, Sharon A.

Type

Book

Material

Published material

Publication info

New York, NY, American Museum of Natural History, ©2013

Notes

Caption title.

"June 21, 2013."

A new species of the didelphid marsupial genus Marmosops is described from the Pakaraima Highlands of western Guyana and from two highland sites in eastern Venezuela. All known specimens were collected on sandstone table mountains (eroded fragments of the Roraima Formation) in the eastern subregion of Pantepui. The new species, M. pakaraimae, is one of only seven mammals known to be endemic to Pantepui, and phylogenetic analyses of cytochrome-b sequence data indicate that its sister taxon is M. parvidens, a geographically adjacent lowland species. Our results, together with those from phylogenetic studies of other Pantepui endemic mammals, suggest that at least some of these highland taxa evolved from lowland species in the late Cenozoic and are neither ancient relicts of tepui vicariance nor the descendents of long-distance-dispersing Andean progenitors.

Subjects

Classification , Evolution , Guyana , Mammals , Marmosops , Marmosops pakaraimae , Mountain animals , Phylogeny , Venezuela

Call Number

QL1 .A436 no.3778 2013

Language

English

Identifiers

OCLC: 849922844