Niviventer excelsior (Thomas 1911)

[Niviventer] excelsior (Thomas 1911), Abstr. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1911 (90): 4.

Type Locality: SW China, W Sichuan, Tatsienlu, 9000 ft (2744 m).

Vernacular Names: Sichuan Niviventer.

Synonyms: Niviventer tengchongensis Deng and Wang 2002 .

Distribution: SW China (W Sichuan, NW and C Yunnan); see Musser and Chiu (1979) and Wang (2003).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: A montane southwestern Chinese endemic apparently morphologically most closely related to N. andersoni and occurring sympatrically with it and N. confucianus (Musser, 1981 b; Musser and Chiu, 1979). Early to middle Pleistocene cave sediments in the Sichuan-Guizhou region of S China have yielded fossils identified as N. excelsior (Zheng, 1993) . See account of N. andersoni . In his checklist of Chinese mammals, Wang (2003:203) listed tengchongensis as simply "Deng et Wang, subsp. Nov. 2002," a subspecies of N. excelsior, but the taxon has yet to be published with a diagnosis and identification of holotype (D. Lunde, in litt., 2004).