Grammomys dolichurus (Smuts, 1832)

Species: Grammomys dolichurus (Smuts, 1832) View in CoL

Synonymy:

M [us] dolichurus Smuts, 1832

Thamnomys baliolus Osgood, 1910

Grammomys tongensis Roberts, 1931

Type locality: South Africa, near Cape Town .

Distribution: Eastern part of South Africa, from Limpopo Province along coast through KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces to Port Elizabeth ( Fig. 5 View Figure 5 ; de Graaff 1981, 1997, Taylor 1998) and Eswatini (A. Monadjem, pers. comm.); the presence in southern Mozambique and, possibly, Zimbabwe should be confirmed. All previous records reported under this name in other parts of Africa belong to other species, mainly to G. surdaster .

Comments: One syntype skull of dolichurus from the Cape region is very damaged and could not be included in our morphometric analyses; the other syntype is very young, hence it was also not included. The species name has been attributed to many other taxa, and a number of scientific names were synonymized with it ( Musser and Carleton 2005). We restrict it to the South African genetic clade, which seems to be different morphologically ( Fig. 4 View Figure 4 ; Supporting Information, File S3), as also suggested by previous studies. For example, Musser and Carleton (2005) mention that ‘specimens of true dolichurus from South Africa have duller pelage and more inflated bullae than animals from East and West Africa; should these prove to be diagnostic specific differences, the northern populations should be identified as G. surdaster ’. Our genomic analysis supports this view unequivocally. Here, as first proposed by Roberts (1951), we keep only two synonyms of G. dolichurus : baliolus and tongensis . They were both assigned to the dolichurus group with PP =.2 only, with a higher probability of belonging to the surdaster group ( Table 1 View Table 1 ), but the two groups are overlapping morphologically ( Fig. 4 View Figure 4 ), and the genetic material close to both type localities clearly belongs to G. dolichurus ( Fig. 6 View Figure 6 ).

Karyotype: The karyotype of specimens from the Eastern Cape province and from Port St. Johns is 2 n = 52, FN = 62, FNa = 58 (Kryštufek etal. 2008; notethatallspecimensreportedas G.cometes in their karyotypic and CYTB phylogenetic analyses in fact represent G. dolichurus ; see Bryja et al. 2017). Dippenaar et al. (1983) reported two different karyotypes from South Africa, 2 n = 52 and 2 n = 44, but the latter is most likely to be G. cometes (see above).