Lonchura atricapilla obscura Restall

LeCroy, Mary, 2013, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 11. Passeriformes: Parulidae, Drepanididae, Vireonidae, Icteridae, Fringillinae, Carduelinae, Estrildidae, And Viduinae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2013 (381), pp. 1-155 : 119

Lonchura atricapilla obscura Restall

Lonchura atricapilla obscura Restall, 1995: 154 (Sampit, 2 ° 329S, 112 ° 549E, Parit, 3 ° 109S, 113 ° 439E, Kalimantan Tengah).

Now Lonchura atricapilla jagori (Martens, 1866) . See Snow, 1997: 4; Restall, 1997: 129–130; LeCroy, 1999: 218–219; Dickinson, 2003: 735; Smythies, 2000: 615–616; Payne, 2010: 369–370.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 447931, adult male, collected at Parit, 02.09S, 112.58E (BirdLife International, 2001: 2608), Tjempaga (Chamaga) River, about 20 mi above its junction with the Sampit River ( Mayr, 1938: 5), Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia, on 16 June 1935, by J.J. Menden.

COMMENTS: No type was designated in the original description. Restall discussed ‘‘35 or 40 Chestnut Munias’’ he found in a Jakarta bird market that were said to have come from Sampit ‘‘although not necessarily precisely where the birds were trapped.’’ He selected two of those birds from Sampit ‘‘for which I propose the name Lonchura atricapilla obscura .’’ He also discussed two specimens in AMNH collected at Parit in 1935 by Menden and listed by Mayr (1938: 45) as Lonchura atricapilla minuta . Restall gave incorrect coordinates for Parit.

As Restall said, Mayr noted that the two Parit specimens were darker than birds from northern Borneo and the Natuna Islands, and Mayr probably refrained from naming them, expecting that they would ‘‘fox’’ with time. Restall compared these two specimens with his painting of two of the Sampit birds and decided they were the same, although Mayr’s birds were now only ‘‘marginally darker’’ than birds from northern Borneo. No Sampit specimens ever came to AMNH.

A note from the editor (5 David Snow) in the original description said that details of the ‘‘Holotype’’ would appear in a later issue. The same editor (5 Snow, 1997: 4) later reported: ‘‘The two specimens that were at hand when the taxon was named were AMNH specimens 447931 and 447932, both males, collected at Parit, Tjempaga, Sampit, S. Borneo, 3 July 1935. The first of these (447931) should have been designated as the holotype.’’

Although Restall proposed the name obscura for the two Sampit birds but also included the two Parit specimens, the type series should be interpreted as including all four specimens. Snow, by nominating the ‘‘holotype’’ in a publication subsequent to the original description, actually designated AMNH 447931 as the lectotype of obscura (ICZN, 2000: 82–83, Art. 74.5). The one paralectotype in AMNH is AMNH 447932, adult male, Parit, 3 July 1935, collected by Menden. The Sampit specimens may exist only as Restall’s paintings.

The details of the nomenclatural history of Lonchura atricapilla in Borneo were given by LeCroy (1999: 218–219), and summarized here. Mayr called Menden’s specimens L. a. minuta (Meyen, 1834) , following Stresemann (1922: 88) who found Meyen’s name to be older than Munia jagori Martens, 1866 . Salomonsen (1953: 267) found that Fringilla minuta Meyen, 1834 , is preoccupied by both Fringilla minuta Temminck, 1807 , and Fringilla minuta Wied, 1830 , leaving jagori as the oldest available name. But Salomonsen included Borneo birds in L. malacca gregalis , a subspecies he had just described. Mayr et al. (1968: 381) synonymized gregalis with jagori . L. malacca and L. atricapilla are generally now considered to be separate species, based on mitochondrial DNA studies ( Payne, 2010: 369–370).