Marmosini Hershkovitz, 1992

Voss, Robert S., 2022, An Annotated Checklist Of Recent Opossums (Mammalia: Didelphidae), Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (455), pp. 1-77 : 10

Tribe Marmosini Hershkovitz, 1992

TYPE GENUS: Marmosa Gray, 1821 .

REMARKS: The monophyly of Marmosini as constituted herein—including Marmosa , Monodelphis , and Tlacuatzin , but not the other genera referred to “ Marmosidae ” by Hershkovitz (1992) — has been consistently and strongly supported by all relevant phylogenetic analyses of multilocus sequence datasets (e.g., Voss and Jansa, 2009; MayCollado et al., 2015; Vilela et al., 2015; Amador and Giannini, 2016). Recently, however, Beck and Taglioretti (2020) suggested that Marmosini be restricted to include just Marmosa and Tlacuatzin (or that Marmosini be restricted to include just Marmosa with a new tribe for Tlacuatzin ), and that Monodelphis be placed in a separate tribe (Monodelphini). These proposed changes were prompted by phylogenetic analyses that recovered two highly specialized fossil taxa in a clade with Monodelphis . However, as explained elsewhere (appendix 1), Beck and Taglioretti’s phylogenetic results are sufficiently open to question that it seems unnecessary to disrupt the current classification. Restricting Marmosini as they propose would leave the robustly supported clade that includes Marmosa , Tlacuatzin , and Monodelphis without a name, and their alternative tribal usage lacks any compensatory advantage for communicating phylogenetic relationships among Recent taxa.