Uromys neobrittanicus Tate and Archbold, 1935

Pine, Ronald H., Mack, Andrew L. & Timm, Robert M., 2017, Marsupials And Rodents Of The Admiralty Islands, Papua New Guinea, Occasional Papers of the Museum 352, pp. 1-30 : 23

Uromys neobrittanicus Tate and Archbold, 1935

Menzies and Dennis (1979:63) provided lists “taken from the literature” of species of rodents found on various islands in the vicinity of New Guinea. For “ Admiralty Islands (Manus Island),” they listed “ Uromys neobrittanicus .” We have been unable to find any records of this species other than those from New Britain , in the literature that they cited, and do not know the source of Menzies and Dennis’s information. Nor have we found any mention in the literature published subsequent to Menzies and Dennis’s publication, of the Admiralties’ harboring of this species.

Williams (1997) provided, in a table, measurements of a subfossil mandible from the Pamwak site, which was identified as of an “ Aromys sp. [sic]”, although this identification was mentioned nowhere else in that dissertation, nor was it mentioned by Williams later (1999). Flannery (in litt.) found no skeletal material that he identified as of Uromys , among the Pamwak specimens.

The original and consistent spelling of this animal’s name was Uromys neobrittanicus (see Tate and Archbold 1935). In the same paper, Tate and Archbold also named Hydromys neobrittanicus [sic] and consistently used this spelling. Ellerman et al. (1941) simply spelled this name as Uromys neobritannicus without comment, whereas they spelled the name of the Hydromys as neobrittanicus . Laurie and Hill (1954) incorrectly emended the names of both the Uromys and the Hydromys to neobritannicus , on the basis that the original spellings were misspellings. Musser and Carleton (2005) also rendered the names as Uromys neobritannicus and Hydromys neobritannicus , and Flannery and White (1991) and Flannery (1995b) also used both these spellings.