Gazetteer of Collecting Localities of African Rodents

About this book

Language: English with bilingual introduction in English and French

From the introduction:

"The taxonomy of African rodents has, until comparatively recently, been in a state of great confusion. Attempts at a radical revision have, however, been in progress for several years now and it has become very evident that it is absolutely necessary to pin-point the precise localities from which specimens have been collected. Tracing collecting and type localities has involved considerable labour and much still remains to be done. To date, the coordinates of some 4500 localities have been put on record. These are listed here in alphabetical order, with their coordinates and altitude (where known). Countries are indicated by a code letter for brevity.

The localities have been listed from specimens in collections in museums in Africa, Europe and the United States as well as from the literature. Localities from which rodents have been collected but which are not represented by specimens in museum collections or published in the literature have not been included.

A major difficulty has been to decide on what spelling to follow. The same place name is often spelt differently by different collectors depending on their nationality: for example, the river Uebi Scebeli (Italian spelling) in Somalia appears in English publications as Webi Shebeli. Furthermore, many transliteration errors have crept in. The principle adopted here has been to follow the spelling of the place name as given on the labels or in the literature: followed by the correct name if necessary. Unless the exact point of capture on a river is known, the coordinates given are those of the source and the mouth of the river in question.

The localities have been pinpointed as exactly as possible. Much use has been made of existing gazetteers, such as those published by Chapin (1954), Setzer (1956), Swynnerton & Hayman (1951) and others. The gazetteers of African territories published by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names have been particularly useful as have the corrections made to some of the type localities appearing in Allen's (1939) checklist by Moreau, Hopkins & Hayman (1946). Many localities have been discovered by systematically searching available maps, both old and new, and by studying the routes and notebooks of collecting expeditions. Nevertheless, many localities cannot be traced, either because of wrong spelling or because the place is no longer known by the name given in the record. African villages often move or change their names on the death of their chiefs."

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