Lemniscomys barbarus (Linnaeus 1766)

[Mus] barbarus Linnaeus 1766, Syst. Nat., 12th ed., Vol. 1: addenda.

Type Locality: Morocco (= "Barbaria," see discussion in Carleton and Van der Straeten, 1997).

Vernacular Names: Barbary Lemniscomys.

Synonyms: Lemniscomys ifniensis Morales Agacino 1935 .

Distribution: "Coastal region of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, northwest and north of the Atlas Mountains" (Carleton and Van der Straeten, 1997:665); endemic to the Barbarian region (Maghreb) of NW Africa.

Conservation: IUCN – Least Concern.

Discussion: Member of the L. barbarus group, which also contains L. zebra and L. hoogstraali . Carleton and Van der Straeten (1997) provided a comprehensive systematic revision of this assemblage. Results of their morphometric and color pattern analyses demonstrated that the populations formerly constituting L. barbarus (e. g., as listed by Musser and Carleton, 1993) actually consists of L. barbarus, which is endemic to NW Africa, and L. zebra, stretching across Subsaharan Africa from Senegal in the west to Kenya and Tanzania in the east. Chromosomal data for an Algerian sample documented by Filippucci et al. (1986). Fragments identified as L. barbarus are reported from middle Pleistocene sediments at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco (Amani and Geraads, 1993).