Ochromyscus yemeni ( Sanborn and Hoogstraal, 1953 )

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 : 13

(iii) Ochromyscus yemeni ( Sanborn and Hoogstraal, 1953)

Yemen white-bellied rocky mouse.

Myomys fumatus yemeni Sanborn and Hoogstraal, 1953 , Fieldiana Zool., 34 (23): p. 241 (subspecies description).

Holotype

FMNH 77972 ; adult male, dry skin and skull, collector’s number HH 6398; collected by H. Hoogstraal, 13 February 1951 .

Type locality

Yemen, Kariet Wadi Dhahr, 6 miles north-west of San’a, altitude 6400 ft (1950 m a.s.l.)

Taxonomic notes

It was described as a subspecies of fumatus (i.e. O. brockmani ), but it is significantly larger and there are other diagnostic traits that led Musser and Carleton (2005) to upgrade it to a separate species. It is not clear if Musser and Carleton (2005) compared it really with O. brockmani or with O. niveiventris , but we propose to keep its separate species status due to clear morphological distinctiveness ( Figs 5–7 ). We have not analysed nuclear genetic data, but mtDNA phylogeny suggests that it is a monophyletic clade, sister to all remaining O. brockmani populations, from whose it is geographically separated by the Red Sea.

Figures

Figure 5. Co-ancestry matrix of Ochromyscus shown as a heat map. The scale indicates the proportion of the nearest neighbour loci. fineSTRUCTURE clusters are shown in grey and InfoMap clusters in black. The bars on the left correspond to MOTUs identified by the branch-cutting of the ML tree from concatenated ddRAD data (see also Fig. 4).

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.

Figure 7. Wireframe plots showing differences between species’ mean shapes of the skull from dorsal, lateral, and ventral views (from top to bottom).The colour code is the same as in Figure 6.