Species
Stenocephalemys albocaudatus
Description
Stenocephalemys albocaudatus Frick, 1914
Stenocephalemys albocaudata Frick, 1914
Type locality: Chilalo Mountains, Inyala Camp (“Nyala Camp”?), Ethiopia.
Taxonomic notes: The name was changed to Stenocephalemys albocaudatus by Denys et al. (2017) for gender agreement.
This is the most specialized species of the genus, adapted to life in open Afro-alpine habitats. It has been considered as endemic to Bale and Arsi Mountains (Yalden et al. 1976, Bekele & Yalden 2013), but Bryja et al. (2018) recently discovered another population in the Guwassa area on the other side of the Great Rift Valley. The species lives there in sympatry with S. sokolovi, but they differ in their preferred microhabitats (Mizerovská et al. 2020). A similar situation was observed in the Arsi Mountains, where the mosaic of different habitats allows sympatric occurrence of S. albocaudatus and S. griseicauda (Kostin et al. 2019). On the other hand, in the Bale Mountains these two species occupy different parts of the elevational gradient (Yalden 1988, Lavrenchenko et al. 1997).
Taxonomy
Stenocephalemys albocaudatus is a species. It belogs to the Muridae family.
