Taxonomic revision of the Dasypus kappleri complex, with revalidations of Dasypus pastasae (Thomas, 1901) and Dasypus beniensis Lönnberg, 1942 (Cingulata, Dasypodidae)

Abstract

Dasypus kappleri is the largest species of the genus Dasypus and is restricted to the Amazonian rainforest biome. Over the last century, related taxa have been described and synonymized without comprehensive analyses, and the current classification involving two subspecies, Dasypus k. kappleri and Dasypus k. pastasae, has never been revised. The aim of this work is to clarify the taxonomy of Dasypus kappleri through integrative morphological and morphometric analyses. We examined 70 specimens housed in scientific collections as well as photographs of the type specimens of five nominal taxa. Three methodologies (discrete characters, linear and geometric morphometrics) were employed. All results converged on the recognition of three allopatric groups, each with diagnostic qualitative and quantitative traits, that we recognize as full species: Dasypus kappleri Krauss, 1862, occurs in the Guiana shield; Dasypus pastasae (Thomas, 1901) is distributed from the eastern Andes of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela south of the Orinoco River into the western Brazilian Amazon; and Dasypus beniensis Lönnberg, 1942, occurs in the lowlands of Amazonian Brazil and Bolivia to the south of the Madre de Dios, Madeira, and lower Amazon rivers. This revision raises to nine the number of living species of Dasypus.

Taxonomic revision of the tigrina Leopardus tigrinus (Schreber, 1775) species group (Carnivora, Felidae)

“…Recent taxonomic revisions of medium and large-sized mammals have shown that the potential diversity in different groups (e.g., Carnivora, Cingulata, Rodentia Hystricognathi, Lagomorpha) have been underestimated (Nascimento, 2010(Nascimento, , 2014Feijó & Langguth 2013;Helgen et al, 2013;Feijó & Cordeiro-Estrela, 2016). Regardless the taxa, the proper evaluation of the species and subspecies ranks should be based on a geographic broad scale, taking into account the individual, sexual, population and geographic variation, and preferable using complementary approaches.…”

Mammalian Diversity and Matses Ethnomammalogy in Amazonian Peru Part 2: Xenarthra, Carnivora, Perissodactyla, Artiodactyla, and Sirenia

“…Our voucher material exhibits most of the distinguishing features attributed to Dasypus pastasae by Feijó and Cordeiro-Estrela (2016), of which the most consistently useful seem to be (1) the high relief of the central scale of each scalerosette on the pelvic shield (giving this part of the carapace a diagnostically bumpy texture), and (2) the relatively low and uninflated lateral palatine keels ( fig. 6B).…”

Taxonomic revision of the long-nosed armadillos, Genus Dasypus Linnaeus, 1758 (Mammalia, Cingulata)

“…External and cranial qualitative characters were mainly based on diagnostic traits of species and subspecies (senior and junior synonyms) of the genus Dasypus as previously described [3,24,26,31,33,34,36,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55] and on our observations of trait variation. A list of characters analyzed in this study is presented in the S2 Appendix.…”

“…Dasypus is the most speciose genus of the order Cingulata, including approximately 40% of living known armadillo species [1,2,3]. It has the widest distribution of the order, occurring from Argentina to the United States, encompassing the latitudes from 39°S to 40°N [4].…”

“…Unlike the XIX th century, the taxonomy of the long-nosed armadillos over the last decades has had only minor changes. Recently, Feijó and Cordeiro-Estrela [3] split Dasypus kappleri into three species, revalidating D . pastasae and D .…”