Conilurus penicillatus (Gould, 1842) . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1842:12.

TYPE LOCALITY: Australia, Northern Territory, Port Essington, sea shore .

DISTRIBUTION: Australia; "northern coastal area of the Northern Territory, adjacent islands [including Melville Island, Groote Eylandt, and the Pellew Group], and the extreme north-east of Western Australia " (Watts and Aslin, 1981:133). SC Papua New Guinea in Morehead region (Waithman, 1979).

SYNONYMS: hemileucurus, melanura, melibius, randi.

COMMENTS: Analyses of external morphology of glans penis and spermatozoal structure and form provided by Breed (1984), Breed and Sarafis (1978), and Morrissey and Breed (1982). Results from studies of chromosomal features (Baverstock et al., 1977 c, 1983b), electrophoretic data (Baverstock et al., 1981), phallic morphology (Lidicker and Brylski, 1987), and dental traits (Misonne, 1969) supported the hypothesis that C. penicillatus is phylogenetically closely related to Mesembriomys gouldii, and microcomplement fixation data placed it in the same clade close to species of Leporillus and Mesembriomys (see Watts et al., 1992). Conilurus penicillatus is one of the few Old Endemic Australian murines that also occurs in SC New Guinea where it is still represented by only two specimens (Flannery, 19906:192).