THREE SMALL COLLECTIONS OF MAMMALS FROM 

 LIISPANIOLA 



By GERRIT S. MILLER, JR. 



curator, division of mammals, u. s. national museum 



(With Two Plates) 



The United States National Mnseum has received from Haiti and 

 the Dominican RepubHc three small collections of mammals that have 

 not yet been reported on. 



Of these, the first was made in a sheltered side crevice, probably 

 once the nesting place of the giant Haitian barn owl, near the bottom 

 of a deep sink hole called the Trujin, on the massif of La Selle, Haiti. 

 How he explored this cavity by means of a tall pine, felled and lowered 

 into the hole to serve as a ladder, has been told by Dr. Alexander Wet- 

 more in " Explorations and Field-Work of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion in 1927," p. 36. The bones from this source are particularly in- 

 teresting because they represent an almost " pure culture " of the 

 native mammal fauna, nearly uncontaminated by introduced European 

 rodents. Among the Trujin remains is the most nearly complete skull 

 of Brofoiiiys yet collected, and a series of Nesophontes skulls that 

 indicates the presence of well-defined sexual characters independent 

 of size. 



The second collection was made during March, 1929, in caves near 

 En Cafe on Gonave Island, Haiti, by Arthur J. Poole, who has de- 

 scribed his experiences in " Explorations and Field-Work of the 

 Smithsonian Institution in 1929," pp. 71-73. It shows that most of 

 the genera of extinct mammals found in the caves of the Haitian 

 mainland were also represented in the fauna of Gonave. 



The third collection is from the neighborhood of Constanza, in 

 the mountainous interior of the Dominican Republic (altitude about 

 4,000 feet ) , a region that Herbert W. Krieger visited during the 

 spring of 1930. It consists of two lots of bones. One of these was 

 dug from an Indian refuse deposit, about 2^ feet deep, on the valley 

 floor at Cerro de Monte, 6 km. east of Constanza. The other was con- 

 tained in owl pellets found in a shelter under an overhanging ledge 

 about 100 feet up the northern flank of Monte Culo de Maco above 

 the Arroyo Limoncillo at a point some 10 km. southwest of Constanza. 

 The mass of about half a peck of dry, partly disintegrated pellets was 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 82, No. 15 



