Malacomys longipes Milne-Edwards 1877

Malacomys longipes Milne-Edwards 1877, Bull. Sci. Soc. Philom. Paris, ser. 6, 12: 10.

Type Locality: Gabon, Gaboon River (vicinity of Ogooue, Gabon; see Rautenbach and Schlitter, 1978:414).

Vernacular Names: Common Malacomys.

Synonyms: Malacomys australis Ansell 1958; Malacomys centralis De Winton 1897; Malacomys wilsoni Thomas 1916 .

Distribution: From SE Nigeria, C and S Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea (including Bioko; Eisentraut, 1965), and Gabon eastward through Republic of Congo, S Central African Republic, Dem. Rep. Congo to S Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda; also to the south in NW Zambia and NE Angola (Crawford-Cabral, 1998).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Karyotype of sample from Côte d’Ivoire is 2n = 48, FN = 52 (Fna = 48), with the autosomal complement consisting of all telocentric pairs except for a single pair of small metacentrics, a composition regarded by Viegas-Péquignot et al. (1983) to be close to the presumed ancestral complement for murines. A sample from Gabon exhibits an identical karyotype (Lecompte, 2003).