Common African Fat Mouse

discussion

Discussion: Formerly included bocagei and opimus (see those accounts). Demeter (1982) identified the lone Ethiopian record (Sabober Plains, Awash National Park) as S. pratensis because of their large skull size compared with S. parvus; his range of values match those for S. pratensis in the AMNH, not the larger S. opimus which occurs no closer than extreme SW Sudan. Although leucorhynchus is usually included in S. krebsii (Coetzee, 1977 a; Meester et al., 1986), Crawford-Cabral (1998) provisionally recognized it as a species because relative ear length of the holotype (Angola, Capelongo) is more similar to S. pratensis; he also suggested that leucorhynchus may prove to be another geographic sample of the latter. After studying the holotype of leucorhynchus and others from Capelongo (AMNH 85815, 85816, 86976) in S Angola, we agree with that assessment. We have not seen material between Ethiopia and the West African S. caurinus; that region is mostly occupied by the much larger-bodied S. opimus. Identified from the early Pleistocene of South Africa based on isolated molars (Avery, 1998).

Order Rodentia - Family Nesomyidae

distribution

Distribution: Southern and East Africa — S Angola (Carter and Hill, 1941) and N Namibia; eastward through N Botswana (Smithers, 1971), Zimbabwe (Smithers and Wilson, 1979), N South Africa (Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Gauteng, and N KwaZulu-Natal; de Graaff, 1997 ff; Taylor, 1998), and Mozambique (Smithers and Lobao Tello, 1976); north through Zambia (Ansell, 1978), Malawi (Ansell and Dowsett, 1988; Chitaukali et al., 2001; Lawrence and Loveridge, 1953), and Tanzania (AMNH material) to EC Ethiopia (Demeter, 1982).

Order Rodentia - Family Nesomyidae

distribution

DISTRIBUTION: South Africa (Natal, Zululand, Transvaal), Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, N Botswana, NE and N Namibia, N Malawi, Zambia, Angola, Zaire, SW Sudan and west to Cameroon.

Order Rodentia - Family Muridae

discussion

COMMENT: Includes bocagei, gazellae, and opimus; see Coetzee, 1977, Part 6.8: 1 - 2, who also included caurinus and jacksoni in this species, but Swanepoel and Schütter, 1978, in Schütter, ed., Bull. Carnegie Mus. Nat. Hist., 6: 53 - 76, considered caurinus and jacksoni distinct species.

Order Rodentia (Part 3)