Tatera Lataste, 1882

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 560

Tatera Lataste, 1882 . Le Naturaliste, Paris 2:126.

TYPE SPECIES: Dipus indicus Hardwicke, 1807 .

SYNONYMS: Gerbilliscus, Taterona .

COMMENTS: A member of the tribe Taterillini according to Pavlinov et al. (1990). Taxonomic revisions of various inclusiveness were provided by Pirlot (1955) and Bates (1985, 1988). Davis (1975a) presented a review of the genus, in which, aside from T. boehmi , he considered all the species to cluster either in an afra group or robusta group. Chromosomal information for some species was reported by Matthey and Petter (1970). Results of craniometric studies of Angolan Tatera were presented by Crawford-Cabral (1988) and Crawford-Cabral and Pacheco (1991). Pavlinov et al. (1990) regarded true Tatera to consist only of the Asian species T. indica , placed all the African species in the genus Gerbilliscus (subgenera Gerbilliscus and Taterona ), and identified Taterillus as its closest relative. There are distinctive features separating the Asian from all the African species, but we are unconvinced they are not part of the same monophyletic group and treat them that way by allocating the species among the subgenera Tatera , Taterona , and Gerbilliscus .