Mus tasmaniensis Krefft, 1868c

Parnaby, Harry E., Ingleby, Sandy & Divljan, Anja, 2017, Type Specimens of Non-fossil Mammals in the Australian Museum, Sydney, Records of the Australian Museum 69 (5), pp. 277-420 : 407-408

Mus tasmaniensis Krefft, 1868c nomen nudum

Trans. Roy. Soc. N.S.W. 1, 32. (1868)

Common name. Swamp Rat.

Current name. Rattus lutreolus velutinus ( Thomas, 1882) , following Taylor & Horner (1973).

Material. PA.22, young adult female, skull, body in alc. Entered in the Palmer Register in c. 1878 as “ Mus fuscipes, Ouse R. Tasmania, spirits” with no other data.

Condition. Cranium complete, right dentary missing coronoid process. Body in alc. complete, fur faded.

Type locality. Banks of the Ouse River , Tasmania, collected by George Masters ( Krefft, 1868c) .

Comments. This taxon is a nomen nudum as recognized by Iredale & Troughton (1934) and Taylor & Horner (1973). The latter authors identified PA.22 as Rattus lutreolus velutinus , and suggest that it is Krefft’s “ type ”, on the basis that it is the only such specimen collected by Masters, that is labelled as being from Ouse River. A list of specimens lodged in the AM from Masters during the period December 1866 to March 1867 includes “3 Mus tasmaniensis ” ( Krefft, 1868b) . We have not located other specimens. Krefft appears never to have published a description of this taxon and it is not mentioned in his book ( Krefft, 1871a). The first mention by Krefft that he had a new rodent species Mus tasmaniensis appears to be his paper in the Trans. Roy. Soc. of NSW ( Krefft, 1868c) and the manuscript, with slight modifications, manifested on another occasion in 1868, as a privately published pamphlet Notes on the Fauna of Tasmania, which was reproduced in 1869 as an appendix in the Papers Proc. Roy. Soc. Tas., see Whitley (1961).