The identities and allocations of Taeromys Paraxanthus and T. Tatei, two taxa based on Compositie Holotypes (Rodentia, Muridae)

In 1941, Henri Jacob Victor Sody's paper "On a collection of rats from the Indo-Malayan and Indo-Australian regions" was published in volume 18 of the journal Treubia. This important paper contains the descripitions of 43 new genera, species, and subspecies proposed by Sody, and the identifications and some descriptions of the rats and mice that were housed in the former Zoological Museum of Buitenzorg, now the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense in Bogor, Indonesia. The published report was the last major work written by Sody on Asian rats and mice and he included in it data he had compiled during his early studies of murid rodents in the late 1920's and the decade that followed. It is a final documentation of Sody's identifications of murid rodents and a summary of his opinions and philosophy regarding their systematics. Mammalogists who study taxonomy of Indo-Malayan and Indo-Australian rats and mice have to consult Sody's report of 1941 and eventually must study holotypes of the forms he named and described in that paper. Most of the holotypes are now in the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie at Leiden. I had the opportunity to study these specimens in the museum at Leiden during the winter of 1969 and was able to resolve the identities of many of Sody's names, taxa which were difficult to identify and allocate from his original descriptions. Two of these, Taeromys paraxanthus and T. tatei, are discussed in this paper. They are of special interest because each is a composite based on elements of two species. ABBREVIATIONS AND METHODS The specimens discussed in this paper are in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History (A.M.N.H.), the British Museum (Natural