Gerbilliscus (Taterona) phillipsi de Winton 1898

Gerbilliscus (Taterona) phillipsi de Winton 1898, Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., ser. 7, 1: 253.

Type Locality: Somalia, Hanka Dadi.

Vernacular Names: Phillips's Gerbil.

Synonyms: Gerbilliscus (Taterona) bodessana (Frick 1914); Gerbilliscus (Taterona) minusculus Osgood 1936; Gerbilliscus (Taterona) umbrosa (Dollman 1912) .

Distribution: Somalia and the Rift Valley in Ethiopia and Kenya (see Bates, 1988), westward to Senegal and Mali (see Pavlinov, 1997).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc) as Tatera phillipsi .

Discussion: Subgenus Taterona . Revised by Bates (1988), who summarized distributional and ecological information, and reviewed by Pavlinov et al. (1990). Sympatric with G. robustus . The form minusculus was included here by Pavlinov et al. (1990) but designated incertae sedis by Bates (1988) because all specimens he examined from the type locality, including topotypes, were juveniles and impossible to identify as either G. phillipsi or G. robusta . A discriminant function analysis of cranial traits was used by Pavlinov (1997) to define the specific distinctness of G. robustus, G. philippsi, and G. guineae and also to demonstrate that holotypes of bodessana and minusculus clustered with examples of G. phillipsi .