Rattus praetor ( Thomas, 1888 )

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

Rattus praetor ( Thomas, 1888)

Menzies and Dennis (1979:63) listed Rattus ruber (= Rattus praetor ) for “ Admiralty Islands (Manus Island),” but gave no source for this information. Taylor et al. (1982) recorded Australian Museum specimens M7183–M7184 [the basis for Troughton’s (1946) Rattus purdiensis ] from “Bat Island, 5 m, 02°51′S, 146°14′E ” but mentioned no other records in that vicinity. Flannery et al. (1994) did not list R. praetor from Manus, but Flannery (1995b) stated that Rattus praetor praetor occurs on Manus, Bat, and Blup Blup. Flannery has informed us (in litt.) that his source for R. praetor’s supposed presence on Manus must have been Menzies and Dennis (1979).

Williams (1997, 1999) reported R. praetor for the Pamwak site and White et al. (2000) accepted the accuracy of these reports, but T. F. Flannery (see Timm et al. 2016) found no fossils attributable to this species, in his examination of the material. Timm et al. (2016) recently reported that many of the supposed specimens of R. praetor from Pamwak are best attributed to R. detentus .