Corvus minutus Gundlach, 1852 : 315

Steinheimer, Frank D., 2009, The type specimens of Corvidae (Aves) in the Museum für Naturkunde at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, with the description of a new subspecies of Dendrocitta vagabunda, Zootaxa 2149 (1), pp. 1-49 : 26

Corvus minutus Gundlach, 1852: 315

TL: Island of Cuba. Now Corvus palmarum minutus Gundlach, 1852 . See Meinertzhagen 1926: 91 (given in C. brachyrhynchos ), Blake & Vaurie 1962: 270, Madge & Burn 1999: 156, Dickinson 2003: 513. Garrido et al. (1997) treated the form as full species.

ARGUABLE SYNTYPE: ZMB 18925. [No sex or age given]. Loc.: Cuba. Coll.: Gundlach. [Ex, Mus, Meise MS].

COMMENTS: Johannes Gundlach (1810–1896) arrived in Cuba in the year 1838 and he resided there until his death in 1896. Fourteen years after his first encounter with Cuba Gundlach gave a talk to the Boston Natural History Society, on 3 March 1852 ( Gundlach 1852), describing the new form of crow from Cuba. The description of Corvus minutus was apparently based on female specimens. Yet it is unclear if only a single bird or several specimens were studied for the original description. Gundlach forwarded one specimen to the ZMB in January 1868. It at first appeared that Jean Louis Cabanis (1816–1906) had another specimen at hand when editing Gundlach’s notes for the Journal für Ornithologie ( Gundlach 1856). However, the ZMB registers account for only a single bird. Cabanis probably added his remark based on comparisons of published measurements, not of specimens actually handled. The ZMB bird is considered an authentic specimen of Gundlach, most probably a syntype, if not the holotype. A male specimen of Gundlach is at the AMNH, but this has no type status (M. LeCroy in litt. March 2009). An unsexed specimen is found at the FMNH, 30301, with no associated data, from the former Cory Collection (No. 21686) (FMNH online collection data-base, URL: http://fm1.fieldmuseum.org/birds/brd_index.php; accessed 6 April 2009), but the acquisition of an original Gundlach specimen by Charles Barney Cory (1857–1921) in the late 19th century is unlikely. No type specimen of this taxon is listed for the birds from Gundlach’s collection at the IES in Havanna by Román & Garrido (2000: 2–4). However, one of the two Corvus palmarum minutus found by Wiley et al. (2008: 22) for Cuban collections is from the IES, catalogue number 2214, unsexed adult mount from the “Juan C. Gundlach Historical Collection”, original Gundlach number 210 (J.W. Wiley in litt. April 2009). Whether this is an additional type is difficult to assess because no sex is given for the bird and sexes are difficult to separate on plumage and biometrics with given data.