Rattus mordax (Thomas, 1904)

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 mordax (Thomas, 1904)

Williams (1997, 1999) identified Rattus mordax on the basis of subfossils of mandibles from the Pamwak archeological site on Manus. This is the sole reference that we know of to Rattus mordax occurring in the Admiralties. Flannery’s (1995b) map shows no localities anywhere near these islands. In Williams’s (1997) table of mandibular bone and lower dental measurements, some specimens are identified as of Rattus mordax , certain others as of cf. Rattus mordax , and certain others as of Rattus sp. Various of these mandibles probably belong to Rattus detentus . Flannery (see Timm et al. 2016), in his examination of Williams’s specimens, reported only Rattus exulans and what is now known as Rattus detentus .