Aegintha temporalis ashbyi Mathews

Aegintha temporalis ashbyi Mathews, 1923: 40 (Blackall Ranges, South Queensland).

Now Neochmia temporalis temporalis (Latham, 1801) . See Mayr et al., 1968: 353; Schodde and Mason, 1999: 748–749; Dickinson, 2003: 732; and Payne, 2010: 353–354.

SYNTYPE?: AMNH 155712, sex?, Blackall Range, Queensland, 28 September 1903, by Edwin Ashby.

COMMENTS: Mathews (1923: 40) described Aegintha temporalis ashbyi, the type being from the Blackall Range, 26.42S, 152.53E (USBGN, 1957), South Queensland, Australia. No specimen of Aegintha temporalis from the Blackall Range came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. Ashby specimen AMNH 155712 from the Blackall Range, collected on 28 September 1903, came directly to AMNH on exchange from Ashby in 1920 and would not have been available to Mathews in 1923. There are no Ashby specimens of this species from the Blackall Range in SAMA (P. Horton, personal commun.) or ANSP (N. Rice, personal commun.). If there were other specimens, they probably perished in the 1935 fire that destroyed a large part of Ashby’s collection (Whittell, 1954: 19).

This is another of the names Mathews rushed into print in 1923 so that it would be available for Mathews (1925). Many of these have scant information concerning a type. In his original description he gave the following characters: ‘‘Differs from A. t. temporalis (Latham) in being smaller and of a brighter colour.’’ Mathews (1925: 221) quoted Ashby: ‘‘This species was very numerous in the Blackall Ranges, Queensland, but the birds were smaller and more brightly coloured than South Australian specimens.’’ It seems likely that he based his description on what Ashby had told him, which would make AMNH 155712 a syntype of ashbyi, and perhaps the only surviving specimen.

The number ‘‘838b’’ that appears on Ashby’s label refers to the number of this species in Mathews (1908).