Leggeornis elegans warreni Mathews

LeCroy, M., 2008, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 7. Passeriformes: Sylviidae, Muscicapidae, Platysteiridae, Maluridae, Acanthizidae, Monarchidae, Rhipiduridae, And Petroicidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 313 (1), pp. 1-287 : 111

Leggeornis elegans warreni Mathews

Leggeornis elegans warreni Mathews, 1916a: 61 (Warren River).

Now Malurus elegans Gould, 1837 . See Schodde, 1982: 78, and Schodde and Mason, 1999: 89.

Probable Holotype: AMNH 602340 , eclipse or immature male, collected on the Warren River , 34.36S, 115.50E ( Johnstone and Storr, 2004: 514), Western Australia, Australia, on 16 February 1910, by Tom Carter. From the Mathews Collection (no. 5129) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews description of this form was minimal: ‘‘Differs from M. e. elegans in having the females darker. Type, Warren River’’. The above specimen is the only Warren River specimen cataloged by Mathews and is the only Warren River specimen that came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. Because it is an eclipse or immature male with only a little of the adult plumage beginning to grow in, Mathews may have assumed that it was like the female. It agrees with other eclipse or immature males of elegans in similar plumage but is darker on the head and tail than females. In addition to the Mathews catalog number, this specimen bears the number ‘‘601’’, which corresponds to the number of this species in Mathews (1908a).