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A new species of jupati, genus Metachirus Burmeister 1854 (Didelphimorphia, Didelphidae) for the Brazilian Amazon

  • Cleuton Lima Miranda , Mario da Silva Nunes , Arielli Fabrício Machado ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Izeni Pires Farias , Fernando Heberson Menezes ORCID logo , Natalia Carneiro Ardente , Manoel Dos Santos-Filho , Yennie Katarina Bredin ORCID logo and Maria Nazareth F. da Silva
Published/Copyright: January 10, 2023
Mammalia
From the journal Mammalia Volume 87 Issue 2

Abstract

The brown or pouchless four-eyed opossums or jupatis represent the genus Metachirus with a wide geographical range in the Neotropics. Recent studies show distinct monophyletic clades with high genetic divergence and recognized two species, Metachirus nudicaudatus and Metachirus myosuros. Nevertheless, there is a need for systematic revision with multiple sources of evidence on the taxonomy of Metachirus, which has never been fully revised. Here we describe a new species of Metachirus for the Brazilian Amazon from the Xingu/Tocantins interfluve using the unification of concepts and evolutionary significant units, morphological, genetic, and geographic data. Our analysis reveals a new species within Metachirus as a differentiated Amazonian clade from the Serra dos Carajás region and the Caxiuanã National Forest, both in the Xingu endemism centre. This new species can be distinguished from the type species, M. nudicaudatus and from M. myosuros through discrete external morphological characters, including cranium and dentition, and molecular data with an average degree of divergence, but ancient divergence time for the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. The Amazon River delimits the distribution of the new species, which also occurs in areas under strong anthropogenic pressure, reinforcing the importance to guide conservation strategies for the region.

Keywords: didelphid; Serra dos Carajás; taxonomy; Xingu/Tocantins interfluve
Corresponding author: Arielli Fabrício Machado, Laboratório de Evolução e Genética Animal, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Manaus, Amazonas 69077-000, Brazil, E-mail:

Funding source: SISBIOTA

Award Identifier / Grant number: 305876/2017-1

Funding source: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, PROTAX

Award Identifier / Grant number: 370542/2021-5

Acknowledgments

We thank the curators Suely M. Aguiar (MPEG), Luis Fabio Silveira and Juliana Barros (MZUSP), João Alves de Oliveira (MN), and Claudia Costa (MCN PUC Minas) for helping with this work. We also thank Paulo Sérgio D’Andrea, Cibele Bonvicino and Fabiana Caramaschi for allowing us to access the material from the Bico do Papagaio region under their responsibility, and Marco Antonio R. Junior, Stepheson Abrantes and Claudia Nunes for specimens from Caxiuanã and Belo Monte. We also wish to express our gratitude to A. L. Gardner for the valuable review of synonymy, providing important suggestions improving it significantly. We thank Fabiana Caramaschi for measuring the skulls of specimens collected in northern Tocantins, Brazil; Leonardo Gomes Vieira and Harley Sebastião for sharing their high-quality Master’s works, which unfortunately could not be included in this study as they are not yet published; Silvia Pavan and Robert Voss (AMNH) for providing photographs of the specimens of M. nudicaudatus from Paracou, French Guiana, deposited at AMNH; Ingrid Macedo (INPA) for photographs of the holotype of the new species, and Filipe Gaudinho (MN) for photographs of the specimen of M. myosuros; and G.H. Shepard Jr. for reviewing and improving the English of the manuscript.

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: We are grateful to CNPq for the financial support of the project (PROTAX 22/2020 and SISBIOTA CNPq/FAPEAM).

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

  4. Research ethics: We conducted this work with integrity, fidelity and honesty and we openly assume responsibility for this work by not knowingly involving or participating in any form of malicious harm to another person or animal.

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2021-0176).

Received: 2021-11-02
Accepted: 2022-07-28
Published Online: 2023-01-10
Published in Print: 2023-03-28

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2021-0176
Keywords for this article
didelphid; Serra dos Carajás; taxonomy; Xingu/Tocantins interfluve

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Conservation
  3. Giant pangolin and white-bellied pangolin observations from a World Heritage site
  4. Ecology
  5. Spatiotemporal overlap between Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus tianschanicus) and sympatric mammalian species on Jeju Island, South Korea
  6. A comparison of summer insectivory among four sympatric mesocarnivores on Izushima, a small island in northern Japan
  7. Feeding ecology of Massoutiera mzabi (Rodentia, Ctenodactylidae) in two national parks of Central Sahara
  8. Change in the composition of cave-dwelling bats after a 53-year interval at the Gruta do Limoeiro (Espírito Santo, Brazil)
  9. The big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) reduces its body mass during winter in a tropical montane ecosystem of central Mexico
  10. Natural history of the fishing bat Noctilio leporinus (Chiroptera: Noctilionidae) in the Gulf of Mexico
  11. Biogeography
  12. First camera-trap evidence of banded civet Hemigalus derbyanus (Mammalia: Carnivora: Viverridae) in Myanmar
  13. Porcupines in Italian islands: update on the distribution of Hystrix cristata in Sardinia
  14. Ethology
  15. Associative colour learning and discrimination in the South African Cape rock sengi Elephantulus edwardii (Macroscelidea, Afrotheria, Mammalia)
  16. Taxonomy/Phylogeny
  17. A new species of jupati, genus Metachirus Burmeister 1854 (Didelphimorphia, Didelphidae) for the Brazilian Amazon
  18. The prevalence of vestigial teeth in two beaked whale species from the North Atlantic
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