﻿328 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol. lOO 



The author expresses his appreciation to the authorities of European 

 museums hsted above for permission to study specimens in their charge. 

 Loan of material from American institutions is gratefully acknowl- 

 edged. Permission to describe a new subspecies of tapiti from 

 specimens in collections of the Chicago Natural History Museum 

 was kindly granted by authorities of that institution. 



Capitalized color terms in descriptions are shown in Robert Ridg- 

 way's "Color Standards and Color Nomenclature." All measurements 

 are in millimeters. 



VERNACULAR NAMES OF SOUTH AMERICAN RABBITS 



Spanish-speaking natives of Latin America distinguish between the 

 true rabbit and the introduced hare by the terms conejo and liebre, 

 respectively. In Brazil, equivalent Portuguese words, coelho and 

 lebre, are used. In some localities conejo is applied also to other 

 animals, such as the agouti (Dasyprocta) , having a real or fancied 

 resemblance to the rabbit. In Argentina, south of the extreme 

 southern range of indigenous leporids, wild-living members of the 

 introduced species Lepus europaeus and Oryctolagus cuniculus are 

 called liebre and conejo, respectively. The cottontail, Sylvilagus 

 jloridanus, is restricted to habitats in northwestern South America 

 where tapitis do not occur. Hence, the term conejo applied to rabbits 

 in general offers no confusion locally. The Guajiros of northern 

 Colombia have named the cottontail dtpana; the Indians of the 

 Venezuelan coast, carpa. The tapiti, Sylvilagus brasiliensis , is most 

 commonly known in Brazil by the Portuguese coelho, and in Andean 

 countries by the Spanish conejo. In Ecuadorian Quechua the tapiti is 

 called cunu. 



The name tapiti, or tapeti, universally adopted in literature for 

 Sylvilagus brasiliensis, is derived from tapiti or tapeti of the Paraguayan 

 GuaranI and Brazilian Tupl languages. English pronunciation of 

 tapiti is "tuh-pee-tee." 



DISTRIBUTION AND HABITAT IN SOUTH AMERICA 



South American representatives of Sylvilagus jloridanus inhabit arid 

 and semiarid tropical regions of Colombia, Venezuela, and some 

 adjacent islands. The altitudinal range is from sea level to approxi- 

 mately 1,000 meters above. Cottontails prefer to hide in dense and 

 thorny thickets bordering open fields or savannas and under scattered 

 hedges and shrubs of scrub country. They do not make burrows. 

 The species is never found in virgin or fully reestablished forests. 

 Cottontails could have been introduced into South America by man 

 or have entered the continent from Central America by following the 

 interconnecting maze of natural and artificially created savannas in 



