Didelphis marsupialis Linnaeus, 1758

Voss, Robert S., 2022, An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (455), pp. 1-77 : 35-36

Didelphis marsupialis Linnaeus, 1758

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: ROM 113908 , the neotype (designated by Feijó and Voss, 2019), consists of the skin, skull, postcranial skeleton, and frozen tissues of an adult female collected at the Brownsburg Nature Park headquarters (4.95° N, 55.18° W; 500 m), Brokopondo District, Surinam .

SYNONYMS: battyi Thomas, 1902; cancrivora Gmelin, 1788; caucae J.A. Allen, 1900 ; colombica J.A. Allen, 1900; etensis J.A. Allen, 1902; insularis J.A. Allen, 1902 ; karkinophaga Zimmermann, 1780; mesamericana J.A. Allen, 1902; particeps Goldman, 1917; richmondi J.A. Allen, 1901; tabascensis J.A. Allen, 1901.

DISTRIBUTION: Didelphis marsupialis occurs from northeastern Mexico (Tamaulipas) southward throughout most of Central America ( Gardner, 1973: fig. 12) to South America; in South America, this species occurs in the humidforested tropical lowlands from Colombia southward to coastal Peru on the west side of the Andes and—by convention (see Remarks)— throughout Amazonia to eastern Bolivia and central Brazil on the east side of the Andes (Cerqueira and Tribe, 2008: map 7).

REMARKS: Feijó and Voss (2019) discussed nomenclatural issues that were definitively resolved by designating a neotype. Didelphis marsupialis has received no serious revisionary attention since Gardner’s (1973) treatment of North American subspecies; the South American forms currently regarded as synonyms or subspecies have not been revised for over a century. The range of D. marsupialis is said to be disjunct from that of D. aurita (Cerqueira and Tribe, 2008), but this conventional view should be reevaluated in the light of new collections from the Cerrado, as should the currently accepted notion that D. aurita is a valid species (see above).

Didelphis pernigra J.A. Allen, 1900

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: AMNH 16071 , the holotype by original designation, consists of the skin and skull of an adult female collected at “Juliaca” (= Santo Domingo: 13.85° S, 69.68° W; ca. 2130 m), Puno department, Peru .

SYNONYMS: andina J.A. Allen, 1902; meridensis J.A. Allen, 1902.

DISTRIBUTION: Didelphis pernigra is said to occur in montane forests from western Venezuela and northern Colombia southward along the Andes to Bolivia (Cerqueira and Tribe, 2008: map 8), but specimens identified as D. pernigra have also been reported from coastal deserts near sea level in western Peru ( Pacheco et al., 2020). Reports of this species from northwestern Argentina are apparently unsupported by voucher specimens ( Teta et al., 2018).

REMARKS: Didelphis pernigra would appear to be the most phenotypically distinct of the three currently recognized species of whiteeared opossums (Lemos and Cerqueira, 2002; Dias et al., 2020), but there has been no assessment of the genetic integrity of this taxon, which ranges across several thousand kilometers of deeply dissected Andean terrain. Although Lemos and Cerqueira (2002) noted a seemingly abrupt transition between the pernigra and albiventris phenotypes along an elevational transect in eastern Bolivia, a phenomenon that they reasonably interpreted as evidence for parapatry between reproductively isolated forms, their inference is another hypothesis that merits genetic investigation.

Didelphis virginiana Kerr, 1792

TYPE MATERIAL AND TYPE LOCALITY: No type material is known to exist. The original description was based on a specimen presumed to have come from Virginia.

SYNONYMS: boreoamericana J.A. Allen, 1902; breviceps Bennett, 1833; californica Bennett, 1833; cozumelae Merriam, 1901; illinensium Link, 1795; pigra Bangs, 1898; pilosissima Link, 1795; pruinosa Wagner, 1843; texensis J.A. Allen, 1901; woapink Barton, 1806; yucatanensis J.A. Allen, 1901.

DISTRIBUTION: Didelphis virginiana occurs from southern Canada throughout most of the eastern and midwestern United States (populations on the Pacific coast of the United States are descended from introductions), in Mexico, and in Central America as far south as Nicaragua ( Gardner, 1973: fig. 14).

REMARKS: Gardner (1973) provided a careful analysis of phenotypic and karyological differences between Didelphis virginiana and D. marsupialis where they occur sympatrically in Mexico and Central America. In the same publication, Gardner commented on geographic variation in size, anatomical proportions, and coloration that he associated with several subspecies of D. virginiana . Three of those subspecies ( D. v. californica , D. v. virginiana , and D. v. yucatanensis ) were recovered as reciprocally monophyletic haplogroups in Cervantes et al.’s (2010) neighbor-joining analysis of mtDNA sequence data, a result that should be followed up with more geographically comprehensive phylogeographic analyses of this taxonomically neglected species.