Southern Four-eyed Opossum

The southern four-eyed opossum (Philander quica) is a species of opossum from South America. == Taxonomy == This species was described in 1824 by Coenraad Jacob Temminck in his 1824 work Monographies de Mammalogie. Similar to many early marsupials, this species was originally described in the genus Didelphis. This species was considered a valid species until 1935, when the Brazilian zoologist Alípio de Miranda-Ribeiro would consider it a subspecies of the gray four-eyed opossum. The Atlantic Forest populations of Philander were considered to be Philander frenatus by James L. Patton & Maria Nazareth Ferreira da Silva in 1997, but the holotype of P. frenatus was collected in eastern Brazil near the city of Belém, well outside the range of this species. P. frenatus was collected by Friedrich Wilhelm Sieber, who never collected from near the Atlantic Forest. In 2018, P. frenatus was synonymized with Philander opossum, leaving "Philander quica" as the oldest valid name for this species. Analysis of the cytochrome b and nucDNA of most members of the genus Philander has shown P. quica to be the sister taxon to all other Philander species. This species is recognized by the American Society of Mammalogists, but not by the IUCN.…