10 Joshua Laerm and James L. Boone 



Peromyscus polionotus — A black-eyed, white Peromyscus was 

 reported from Tallulah Falls, Rabun County, Georgia by Dice (1934:246) 

 who identified the specimen as P. polionotus polionotus. This specimen 

 was noteworthy because the pelage was entirely white, and the feet, 

 toes, and nails lacked any pigment. However, as Dice noted, the eyes, 

 eye-ring, and outer parts of the ears were dark. Tallulah Falls, in the 

 Tallulah River Gorge, is at the southern edge of the Blue Ridge 

 Province in Georgia. While not specifically indicated by Dice, this 

 would have been the northernmost record of the species, from a 

 locality well outside the previously described range (Osgood 1909) 

 and in habitat from which the species had never been reported. Typically, 

 P. polionotus is restricted to sandy soils and does not occur north of 

 the middle Piedmont of Georgia. 



Schwartz (1954) revised the Peromyscus polionotus complex and 

 described several new subspecies. He provided external and cranial 

 measurements of the six subspecies of polionotus he recognized and 

 referred populations of polionotus in the northern portion of Georgia 

 and South Carolina (essentially north of the Fall Line) to P. p. colemani. 

 Schwartz (1954:568) commented on the Dice specimen which he ". . . 

 presumed, on geographical grounds, to be assignable to P. p. colemani" 

 Had Schwartz actually examined the Dice specimen, he probably would 

 not have referred it to P. polionotus. However, Schwartz did not 

 include the specimen in his mensural analysis. Thus, following Dice 

 (1934) and Schwartz (1954), Hall and Kelson (1959), Golley (1962), 

 and Hall (1981) continued to include the specimen as a marginal 

 record for the species. 



We questioned the identification of the Dice specimen because 

 (1) it was collected in quartzite sheer rock walls and talus of the 

 Tallulah River Gorge in the Blue Ridge Province and (2) at a locality 

 some 100 km north of any other specimen record. We compared our 

 measurements of the Dice specimen (University of Michigan Museum 

 of Zoology 68496) to measurements provided by Schwartz (1954) for 

 P. p. colemani and subjected it to our discriminant function (Laerm 

 and Boone 1994). For 8 of the 11 characters examined by Schwartz 

 (1954:565), the Dice specimen was larger than the range of the com- 

 parable measurements made on 11 P. p. colemani by Schwartz. 



Visual comparison of means and ranges of measurements of 110 

 P. polionotus and 107 P. leucopus, which were used to develop a 

 discriminant function for mensural discrimination between these and 

 other southeastern Peromyscus spp. (measurements provided in Laerm 

 and Boone 1994), to the Dice specimen indicates that it generally 

 falls inside the range of measurements available for both polionotus 



