Sonnerat's shrew (''Diplomesodon sonnerati'' or ''Crocidura sonnerati'') is a species of shrew that was first described by

Pierre Sonnerat Pierre Sonnerat (18 August 1748 – 31 March 1814) was a French natural history, naturalist, colonial administrator, writer and List of explorers, explorer. He described numerous species of plants and animals on his travels and is honoured in th ...

from

Pondicherry Pondicherry (), now known as Puducherry ( French: Pondichéry ʊdʊˈtʃɛɹi(listen), on-dicherry, is the capital and the most populous city of the Union Territory of Puducherry in India. The city is in the Puducherry district on the sout ...

somewhere in 1813.

Description

It was described as being larger than the commoner ''

Suncus murinus The Asian house shrew (''Suncus murinus'') is a shrew species native to South and Southeast Asia that has been listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List since 2008 because of its large population and wide distribution. It has been introduced i ...

'' and without a musky smell. Males were shiny black with a white band or patch on the middle of the back. Females also had the white patch but were grey. Sonnerat described the shrew as being five and a half inches 49 mmfrom the head to the base of the tail and the tail being one inch and one line or 29 mm.

Taxonomy

Since no specimen of the species exists, both its taxonomic description and its generic placement remain in question. Sonnerat's_shrew

The supposed shrew species was given a scientific name by Anthony Cheke which was first published in 2012 but the description was not considered valid by some as the

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several ...

was not explicitly designated (in this case the illustration, as there was no specimen) and it was therefore redescribed in 2018. The species was placed tentatively in the genus ''Diplomesodon'' which is nested within ''Crocidura'' according to a molecular phylogenetic study. Cheke placed the species tentatively in the genus based on the observation that the only other shew species with a piebald pattern was in the central Asian species '' Diplomesodon pulchellum''. Considering that no specimen matching the species has ever been found ever since, it is thought that the species has since gone extinct.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q62776822 Hypothetical extinct species Controversial mammal taxa