Tolypeutes sp.

Tolypeutes sp.

Referred material: Four plates of osteoderms from the dorsal shield belonging to the scapular and pelvic bucklers: PIMUZ A/ V 421 ( Fig. 3 View Fig ).

Comment: PIMUZ A/V 421 was originally assigned to T. conurus Geoffroy, 1847 , a species placed in synonymy with the extant species T. matacus Desmarest, 1804 by Osgood (1919), referring to the reassessment of the mataco of Azara (1801) from Desmarest (1804). Te osteoderms of the pelvic and scapular bucklers exhibit a central figure surrounded by peripheral figures composed of small tubercles. Tis configuration of the fixed osteoderms of the dorsal shield is a synapomorphy of Tolypeutes (see Soibelzon et al., 2010). Te second valid species of the genus corresponds to T. tricinctus Linneaus, 1758 , a species only present in the northeastern part of Brazil (Feijó et al., 2015), and thus excluded from the pampean region. Tere is also mention of an extinct species close to T. matacus named T. pampaeus Frenguelli, 1921 , but the latter was synonymized with T. matacus due to lack of sufficient difference on the dorsal shield (Soibelzon et al., 2010). However, the distinction between the two valid species of the genus, i.e., T. matacus and T. trincinctus , in the diagnoses today corresponds only to the number of toes on the forefoot and the morphology of the scutes of the cephalic shield (see Magalhães et al., 2022). For PIMUZ A/V 421, only the exclusion of T. tricinctus from the Pampean region suggests an attribution of the specimen to T. matacus . Consequently, I favor in the present work an open taxonomy by reassigning PIMUZ A/V 421 to Tolypeutes sp.