Ptilotis praecipua Hartert

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 130

Ptilotis praecipua Hartert

Ptilotis praecipua Hartert, 1897c: 370 (5000– 6000 feet high between Mounts Musgrave and Scratchley).

Now Ptiloprora guisei guisei (De Vis, 1894) . See Salomonsen, 1967: 414, Coates, 1990: 268–270, and Higgins et al., 2008: 658.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 696629 , adult male, collected between Mount Musgrave , 08.55S, 147.25E ( USBGN, 1943), and Mount Scratchley , 08.40S, 147.30E ( USBGN, 1943), 5000–6000 ft, Owen Stanley Mountains, Central Province, Papua New Guinea, by A.S. Anthony. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Hartert did not designate a type in the original description but had one female and more than one male specimen. Later, Rothschild and Hartert (1903b: 443) listed as the type a specimen with the above data collected by Anthony, thereby designating it the lectotype; this specimen is the only one in the type series on which Anthony’s name appears. It bears a Rothschild type label. Paralectotypes are: AMNH 696630 , female, collected between Mounts Musgrave and Scratchley, 5–6000 ft ; AMNH 696631 , male, collected between Mount Musgrave and ‘‘ Mt. Stanley. ’’ I consider ‘‘ Mt. Stanley’ ’ a lapsus ; although there is no original label, the ‘‘make’’ of the skins is similar. It seems unlikely that a third skin, now AMNH 696632 , of similar ‘‘make,’’ collected in the Owen Stanley Mountains, 3–5000 ft in 1897, could have been available to Hartert when P. praecipua was published in August 1897 .