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Family Macropodidae
Dorcopsis luctuosa (D’Albertis, 1874)
Dorcopsis luctuosa phyllis Groves & Flannery, 1989: 125, fig. 10.
Holotype.— ♀, skin, skull, postcranial skeleton, vicinity of Merauke (8°30'S, 140°22'E), New Guinea, Indonesia, end of 1959/beginning of 1960, collected for or by A.J.N. Monsanto.
Notes.— The specimen was collected for or by A.J.N. Monsanto, an animal trader based in Merauke but collecting and buying animals in a much larger area around it, which is corroborated by other material in the ZMA collection. (Incidentally, the present author stayed in Merauke during the first half of 1960 and his efforts to contact Mr. Monsanto all failed because of the latter’s frequent absence due to the many trips he made.) It was sold by him to the Amsterdam Zoo (Natura Artis Magistra) where according to one of its labels it died after about 2 months, on 31.xii.1962, reportedly about 4 years old. As small size appears to be an important character of this taxon (Groves & Flannery, 1989; Groves, 2005), it is worth mentioning that on the day of its death the animal had a body mass of 3165 g. Groves (2005: 62) wrote “The subspecies phyllis (Fly River district) is highly distinctive; it appears to fall outside the range of variation of nominotypical luctuosa (Port Moresby district), and is probably a distinct species.”