Parus major lynesi Hartert

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 74

Parus major lynesi Hartert

Parus major lynesi Hartert, 1926a: 287 (forests above Azrou).

Now Parus major excelsus Buvry, 1857 . See Delacour and Vaurie, 1950: 101, and Gosler and Clement, 2007: 739–741.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 680380 , adult male, collected in oak forest above Azrou , 33.27N, 05.14W (Times Atlas), Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco, on 22 May 1924, by Ernst Hartert. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Hartert designated as type of lynesi an adult male in the Rothschild Collection collected in the oak forest above Azrou on 22 May 1924 and noted that he had collected four males in that locality. In Hartert (1928a: 209), he repeated this information for the type. However, AMNH 680379 , collected on 7 May 1924, bears the Rothschild type label, with the Rothschild Museum label marked ‘‘ Type’ ’ by Hartert. This would appear to be an error. Three of the four specimens collected by Hartert above Azrou in 1924 came to AMNH and one of them was collected on 22 May 1924 ; this should be the holotype. An AMNH type label has been attached to that specimen, although the specimen with the Rothschild type label has been kept in the type collection with a label added to indicate the problem. Paratypes are AMNH 680378 and AMNH 680379 , both collected on 7 May 1924. The fourth specimen, also a paratype, was apparently exchanged by Rothschild before the collection came to AMNH, and I have no further data on it .

Paratypes, besides the specimens listed above, include specimens collected by Lynes (1920: 287) in the same area from 25 April–17 July 1919 (not in AMNH) and specimens from the mountain forests of the southern Atlas near Lambèse (Batna) that Klein- schmidt (in litt. to him) had indicated were of the larger form (ICZN, 1999: 76, Art. 72.4).

Hartert (1926a) published an account of his 1924 trip, noting that he was in the Azrou area from 7–23 May. Hartert again visited the area in 1925 ( Hartert, 1927), but only the 1924 specimens are included in his description of lynesi.