Trichomanis hoevenii

Helgen, Kristofer M., Lim, Norman T-L. & Helgen, Lauren E., 2008, The hog-badger is not an edentate: systematics and evolution of the genus Arctonyx (Mammalia: Mustelidae), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 154 (2), pp. 353-385 : 354

TRICHOMANIS HOEVENII, N. G. ET N. SP.

Animal of the size of a very large cat. Fur grey, with a black longitudinal band along the middle of the back. Snout elongated and conical, with a small mouth at the extremity. A long cylindrical tongue, which is thrust out, serves the animal in the collecting of ants, which are its natural food. A more or less bushy tail. Ears not conspicuous. Legs higher than those of Manis , strong claws to the feet.

I have no doubt that this description – however superficial – is more than sufficient to recognise the animal as soon as it will have been reobtained. The type-specimen was caught in the mountainous districts that separate the Residencies of Palembang and Bencoolen in Sumatra .

Zoological excitement over the discovery of ‘T richomanis ’ was not to be long-lived. Four years later, Hubrecht (1895) wrote to inform the members of the Zoological Society of London that van der Hoeven’s insectivorous beast was not actually an unknown edentate, but rather a hog-badger – that is, a montane Sumatran representative of the mustelid genus Arctonyx , previously recorded only from China and the Indian subcontinent:

A letter was read, addressed to the Secretary by Dr. A. A. W. Hubrecht, F.M.Z.S., calling attention to the account of a supposed new Mammal from Sumatra by him, published in the ‘Notes from the Leyden Museum’ (vol. xiii. p. 241), under the belief that it would turn out to be an unknown species of Edentate, and which he had proposed to call Trichomanis hoevenii . Further inquiries and information received from Mr. Pruys Van der Hoeven (after whom the supposed new animal had been named) had convinced Dr. Hubrecht that it was an Arctonyx ( A. collaris ), and that no further hopes could be entertained of the existence of an unknown Edentate in the forests of Sumatra.

A decade after Hubrecht’s second letter was read, the Swiss zoologist Gustav Schneider became the first naturalist actually to obtain a museum specimen of a hog-badger from Sumatra – an adult male collected in the Karo Highlands of Sumatra, deposited in the collections of the Zoological Museum at Strasbourg, and discussed under the name Arctonyx hoevenii ( Schneider, 1905) . Unaware of Schneider’s success, Oldfield Thomas (1910) later wrote that ‘if an Arctonyx occurs in the... mountain districts [of Sumatra], and its characteristics are in any way compatible with Hubrecht’s animal, after elimination of the imaginary Edentate attributes, the name hoevenii may have to be used for it.’ In their report on an expedition to Mt Kerinci in west Sumatra, Robinson & Kloss (1918) redescribed the Sumatran hog-badger on the basis of newly collected series of skins and skulls deposited at the Raffles Museum in Singapore. In keeping with Thomas’ recommendation, they designated a specimen in the Federated Malay States Museum (now the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research) as a neotype for hoevenii to anchor the name’s association with the Arctonyx of Sumatra, because Hubrecht had, rather memorably, been unable to secure a type for the original description. Although they used the name Arctonyx collaris hoeveni in the text of their paper, Robinson and Kloss also figured a plate of the species bearing the name ‘ Arctonyx hoeveni ’, perhaps betraying their uncertainty regarding the Sumatran hog-badger’s degree of taxonomic uniqueness. The only modern taxonomic review of the entire genus, provided by Pocock (1941), recognized A. hoevenii as a distinctive species, a decision overlooked by all subsequent checklist-compilers (e.g. Ellerman & Morrison-Scott, 1951, 1966; Corbet & Hill, 1992; Wozencraft, 2005).

We began this project in an effort to evaluate the morphological and ecological distinctiveness of the Sumatran representative of Arctonyx . In addition to its unusual taxonomic introduction, this Arctonyx population intrigued us for several reasons. Apart from the Sumatran population, Arctonyx does not occur on the Sunda Shelf below Peninsular Thailand – that is, it is absent from the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Java, rendering the Sumatran population a geographically isolated form. Second, it seemed clear from our reading of the literature and our preliminary examinations of museum specimens and their associated data that unlike other Arctonyx , the Sumatran population seems to be truly restricted to montane forests, suggesting an ecological distinction between this disjunct equatorial population and other Arctonyx . Finally, it was immediately clear from initial examinations of museum specimens that Sumatran Arctonyx are morphologically extremely distinctive relative to other Arctonyx , most notably when compared with the geographically nearest population of Arctonyx from southern Thailand. It became clear that full elucidation of the distinctive features of Sumatran Arctonyx necessitated a comprehensive taxonomic review of the genus – as Allen (1929) noted, ‘the precise relationships of the Asiatic hogbadgers still require to be more carefully worked out with adequate material.’ This long-needed review of museum material is the contribution that we present here.