NO. 1976. TBEESHREW8: FAMILY TUPAIID^—LTON. 15 



GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION. 



Tlie Tupaiidse as a whole range from India on the west to and 

 including Mindanao of the Philippine Islands on the east, and from 

 southern China on the north southward to and including Java and 

 the chain of islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra. They are 

 not found eastward of Java, nor on the Celebes, Formosa, Ceylon, or 

 the Andaman Islands so far as known. I know of no specimens or 

 records of the Tupaiidse on the island of Bali, off the east end of Java 

 and just west of Wallace's Line. It would not be surprising to find 

 them on Bali when the fauna of that island becomes better known. 

 They are found on practically all the smaller islands of the Malayan 

 Ai'chipelago, within the limits just mentioned, and more frequently 

 than not develop geographic races or species on them. 



Zoogeographically the distribution of the Tupaiidas coincides 

 almost perfectly with what is termed the Oriental Region or Realm 

 of Wallace and most zoogeographers, and serves perhaps better than 

 any other family of mammals to define that region. The only areas 

 in this region where they do not occur so far as known are the islands 

 of Ceylon, Formosa, the members of the Philippine Islands, north of 

 Mndanao, and the Andaman Islands.^ By Wallace, Ceylon is in- 

 cluded in a separate subregion of the Oriental Region. 



No one genus of the family has a range coextensive with the range 

 of the family. 



The genus Anathana occupies an area almost coextensive with 

 Wallace's Indian subregion, but so far as our records of specimens 

 show, does not extend quite so far to the north, or with the Sclaters' 

 Indian subregion excepting Ceylon. 



The weU-marked genus Urogale is confined to Mindanao of the 

 Philippine Islands. This group of islands has not been made a sub- 

 division of the Oriental Region, but the Philippine mammals for the 

 most part are so different from their relatives of the rest of the Oriental 

 Region that it would seem advisable to have them constitute a dis- 

 tinct subregion of the Oriental . Urogale is thus one of its characteris- 

 tic genera. 



The genus Tupaia has the widest geographic distribution of any of 

 the genera in the familj^, and if we recognize the Philippine Islands 

 as a distinct subregion, it is characteristic of Wallace's Indo-Chinese 

 and Indo-Malayan subregion, or of the Sclaters' Burmo-Chinese 

 and Malayan subregions. The northern of these two subregions is 

 characterized by but a single species group, the helangeri-chinensis; 

 while the southern, the Indo-Malayan or the Malayan subregion is 

 characterized by several well-marked species groups. Of the islands 

 in this subregion Borneo is inhabited by the greatest number of 



1 The absence on the Andamans of treeshrews is rather interesting, as they occur on Preparis Island to 

 the north, and on the Nicobars, or at least the southern islands of the Nicobars to the south. 



