Roosmalen's dwarf porcupine (''Coendou roosmalenorum'') is a
porcupine species from the
New World porcupine
The New World porcupines, family Erethizontidae, are large arboreal rodents, distinguished by their spiny coverings from which they take their name. They inhabit forests and wooded regions across North America, and into northern South America. A ...
family likely endemic to northern
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. Only three specimens were known at the time, and only one had a collection locality.
It is named for
Marc van Roosmalen
Dr. Marc van Roosmalen (born June 23, 1947) is a Dutch-Brazilian primatologist. He was elected as one of the "Heroes of the Planet" by ''Time'' magazine in 2000. His research has led to the identification of several new monkey species, as well a ...
and his son Tomas, whose collections from the middle
Madeira included the first known specimens.
[ It was soon assigned to the genus ''Sphiggurus'',][ Genetic studies in 2013 have since showed ''Sphiggurus'' to be ]polyphyletic
A polyphyletic group is an assemblage of organisms or other evolving elements that is of mixed evolutionary origin. The term is often applied to groups that share similar features known as homoplasies, which are explained as a result of conver ...
(this taxon was omitted from the study).misspelled
Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes (writing system) to represent a language in its written language, written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme) ...
due to a conflicting basionym combination.
References
Natureserve.org
Coendou
Endemic fauna of Brazil
Mammals described in 2001
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