Mammalia 2017; 81(5): 503–511 Boris Kryštufek*, Georgy I. Shenbrot, Janez Gregori, Petr Benda and Rainer Hutterer Taxonomic and geographic setting of Royle’s mountain vole Alticola roylei revisited DOI 10.1515/mammalia-2016-0102 Received July 16, 2016; accepted September 28, 2016; previously published online November 19, 2016 Abstract: In the not too distant past the name Alticola roylei was used to encompass mountain voles which are cur- rently classified as six different species. Such wide use of the taxonomic name still blurs the lines among species of mountain voles in northern India and adjacent Pakistan. By studying museum vouchers we redefine the taxonomic and geographical scope of A. roylei, a mountain vole which is characterized by a combination of dark (hair-brown) dor- sal fur and moderately long tail, bowed zygomatic arches, small bullae, and moderately complex third upper molars. Two names (lahulius and cautus) are listed as junior syno- nyms of roylei. We identified 19 localities as evidence on the presence of Royle’s mountain vole in Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal in India. Further three localities extend the range into Nepal. The total area of the species’ occurrence is estimated as 15,290 km 2 . Royle’s mountain vole is allopat- ric with respect to further two mountain voles of Nepal and northern India, Alticola stoliczkanus (a single case of sym- patry in Manaslu) and Aticola montosus. Keywords: Alticola montosus; Alticola stoliczkanus; habitat modeling; museum collections; zoological nomenclature. Introduction During revisionary work on Asiatic rodents, we came across museum vouchers of mountain voles (genus Alticola Blanford 1881) from Nepal which were recognizably differ- ent from Stoliczka’s mountain vole Alticola stoliczkanus (Blanford 1875), the only species of Alticola reported so far for the country (Pearch 2011). Subsequent compari- son with museum reference material and published data retrieved Royle’s mountain vole Alticola roylei (Gray 1842); our new records shift the distributional border about 400 km eastwards. The more in depth we were disentangling the distributional status of A. roylei, the more evident it became how badly this species needs a thorough revision. The systematic arrangement of mountain voles is far from being definitely established (cf. Lebedev et al. 2007, Litvinov et al. 2015, Bodrov et al. 2016), and the taxo- nomic history was particularly turbulent in the Royle’s mountain vole. In the first comprehensive revision of the genus, Hinton (1926) recognized 14 species, but this number was reduced to merely three species in Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951). The name roylei was used for all mountain voles with moderately long tail and “normal” (i.e. unflattened) skull and having relatively complex third upper molar M 3 (Ellerman 1947, 1961). Alticola roylei therefore encompassed taxa which are currently (Musser and Carleton 2005) classified as six distinct species: Alti- cola argentatus (Severtzov 1879), Alticola montosus (True 1894), Alticola albicaudus (True 1894), Alticola semicanus (Allen 1924), Alticola tuvinicus Ognev 1950, and Alticola olchonensis (Litvinov 1960). Within such broad definition, the range of Royle’s mountain vole was regarded to cover all the major mountain ranges of Central Asia, including Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, Pamirs, Tien Shan, Altai, and Qilian Mts., thus covering an area of about one million square kilometres (cf. Corbet 1978). The current taxonomic setting of Alticola is largely based on a revision by Rossolimo and Pavlinov (1992) who split the three species of Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951) and Corbet (1978) into eight species and restricted Alticola roylei to “few localities in Kashmir”. The name roylei however, although now only exceptionally applied for voles outside India (but see Luo et al. 2000, and Wang 2003), remained in the older literature and on museum voucher tags, and therefore blurring the lines among species of mountain voles occupying northern India and adjacent ranges in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and China. In this contribution, we reassess the taxonomic and distributional status of the Royle’s mountain vole. *Corresponding author: Boris Kryštufek, Slovenian Museum of Natural Hustory, Prešernova 20, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, e-mail: bkrystufek@pms-lj.si Georgy I. Shenbrot: Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-GurionUniversity of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel Janez Gregori: Slovenian Museum of Natural Hustory, Prešernova 20, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Petr Benda: Department of Zoology, National Museum (Natural History), Václavské nám, 68, CZ–115 79 Praha 1, Czech Republic; and Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, 128 44 Praha 2, Czech Republic Rainer Hutterer: Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig, Adenauerallee 160, 53113 Bonn, Germany Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 06.10.17 13:23