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Full-Text Articles in Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
A New Species Of Small-Eared Shrew (Mammalia, Eulipotyphla, Cryptotis) From The Lacandona Rain Forest, Mexico, Lázaro Guevara, Victor Sánchez-Cordero, Livia León-Paniagua, Neal Woodman
A New Species Of Small-Eared Shrew (Mammalia, Eulipotyphla, Cryptotis) From The Lacandona Rain Forest, Mexico, Lázaro Guevara, Victor Sánchez-Cordero, Livia León-Paniagua, Neal Woodman
Neal Woodman
The diversity and distribution of mammals in the American tropics remain incompletely known. We describe a new species of small-eared shrew (Soricidae, Cryptotis) from the Lacandona rain forest, Chiapas, southern Mexico. The new species is distinguished from other species of Cryptotis on the basis of a unique combination of pelage coloration, size, dental, cranial, postcranial, and external characters, and genetic distances. It appears most closely related to species in the Cryptotis nigrescens species group, which occurs from southern Mexico to montane regions of Colombia. This discovery is particularly remarkable because the new species is from a lowelevation habitat (approximately 90 …
Can They Dig It? Functional Morphology And Degrees Of Semifossoriality Among Some American Shrews (Mammalia, Soricidae)., Neal Woodman, Sarah A. Gaffney
Can They Dig It? Functional Morphology And Degrees Of Semifossoriality Among Some American Shrews (Mammalia, Soricidae)., Neal Woodman, Sarah A. Gaffney
Neal Woodman
Small-eared shrews (Mammalia: Soricidae: Cryptotis), exhibit modifications of the forelimb skeleton that have been interpreted as adaptations for semifossoriality. Most species inhabit remote regions, however, and their locomotory and foraging behaviors remain mostly speculative. To better understand the morphological modifications in the absence of direct observations, we quantified variation in these species by measuring 151 individuals representing 18 species and populations of Cryptotis and two species of moles (Talpidae) for comparison. From our measurements, we calculated 22 indices, most of which have been used previously to characterize substrate use among rodents and other taxa. We analyzed the indices using 1) …