Ochromyscus brockmani ( Thomas, 1906 )

Meheretu, Yonas, Mikula, Ondřej, Frynta, Daniel, Frýdlová, Petra, Mulualem, Getachew, Lavrenchenko, Leonid A., Kostin, Danila S., Elmi, Hassan Sh Abdirahman, Šumbera, Radim & Bryja, Josef, 2024, Phylogeny, biogeography, and integrative taxonomic revision of the Afro-Arabian rodent genus Ochromyscus (Muridae: Murinae: Praomyini), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 202 (1), pp. 1-15 : 12

(i) Ochromyscus brockmani ( Thomas, 1906)

Brockman’s white-bellied rocky mouse.

Mus Brockmani (sic!) Thomas, 1906, Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., ser. 7, 18: 298 (species description).

Praomys fumatus allisoni Hayman, 1960 , Rev. Zool. Bot. Afr. 62: 59. (subspecies description, type locality: Robi , Shoa, Ethiopia).

Holotype

NHMUK (London) B.M. no. 6.3.4.8.; adult male, collected by R.E. Drake-Brockman, 23 November, 1905 .

Type locality

Upper Sheikh , British Somaliland, altitude 4500 ft (= 1372 m a.s.l.).

Taxonomic notes

This species has traditionally been reported as Myomyscus (or Myomys or Praomys ) fumatus ( Musser and Carleton 1993) , but Van der Straeten and Robbins (1997) demonstrated that the holotype of fumatus belongs to Mastomys (see more details above and in: Musser and Carleton 2005). The next available name for this taxon was brockmani described by Thomas (1906) from Upper Sheikh in Somaliland. Note that Musser and Carleton (2005) mentioned the incorrect year of 1908 for the original Thomas publication, which is not listed in their list of references at all. Numerous previous records of fumatus / brockmani in fact represent O. niveiventris (compare maps in Figs 1 and 3 ), because the two species have not been distinguished until recently ( Bryja et al. 2019b). Hayman´s (1960) allisoni is synonymized here with O. brockmani based on the geographical position of the type locality ( Figs 1 and 3 ) and the analysis of skull morphometry ( Fig. 6 ).

Figures

Figure 1. Compilation of previous taxonomic and distributional data of Ochromyscus. Background colours represent distribution reported by IUCN Red List for O. (‘Myomyscus’) brockmani (blue) and O. (‘Myomyscus’) yemeni (green), downloaded on 31 May 2021. Blue dots show records of O. (‘Myomyscus’) brockmani from GBIF.org (31 May 2021) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.93ynrv, combined with additional published data from Sudan (Happold 1966), Ethiopia (Yalden et al. 1976), Somalia (Corti et al. 1999), and unpublished data based on vouchers in NHM London (from Somaliland) and MNHN (from Somalia).Green dots represent documented records of O. (‘Myomyscus’) yemeni from GBIF.org (31 May 2021) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.zfj6yh, combined with additional published data from Nader et al.(1983), Sanborn and Hoogstraal (1953), and Büttiker and Harrison (1982) and two vouchers in MNHN Paris (from Saudi Arabia). Red stars show type localities and available names for species of the genus Ochromyscus. Small yellow circles are localities, from which we collected the genetic data.

Figure 3. Distribution of genetic variability and taxonomic summary of the genus Ochromyscus. Different symbols show the distribution of three different species distinguished in this study:stars—O. yemeni, triangles—O. brockmani, circles—O. sp. 3 (=niveiventris; see text for more details); different colours show intraspecific mtDNA variability.Names of mtDNA clades correspond to Figure 2. Background colours represent the predicted distribution of O. (‘Myomyscus’) brockmani (blue) and O. (‘Myomyscus’) yemeni (green) according to the IUCN Red List. Dashed lines encompass clusters of genomically similar specimens identified by InfoMap based on ddRAD data, with corresponding suggested species names.Note that the populations with mtDNA of the ‘Arero’ and ‘Uganda’ clades were not included in the ddRAD analysis, but we assigned them to O. sp. 3 (=niveiventris) based on their morphology (see text for more details). Similarly, no samples of O. yemeni were available for the genomic analysis.The inset photo shows a picture of rocky habitats, typical for Ochromyscus in eastern Ethiopia.

Figure 6. The scatterplot of bgPC scores.The large, filled points mark species’ mean shapes, and small, open points are projections of individual shapes on to the axes. The projections of four holotype skull shapes are indicated by black points labelled by the respective names.