. Bonner zoologische Beiträge : Herausgeber: Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn. Biology; Zoology. 206 Rainer Hutterer & Christian Montermann: A large new species of Sylvisorex from Nigeria Museum, London. He has served the scientific commu- nity for decades by hosting visitors from all around the world at the British Museum mammal collections. Besides writing textbooks on mammals of the Palaearctic and In- domalayan Regions and the World, he has demonstrated his interest in African mammals by careful revisions of hedgehogs, hyraxes. and elephant shrews. He a
. Bonner zoologische Beiträge : Herausgeber: Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn. Biology; Zoology. 206 Rainer Hutterer & Christian Montermann: A large new species of Sylvisorex from Nigeria Museum, London. He has served the scientific commu- nity for decades by hosting visitors from all around the world at the British Museum mammal collections. Besides writing textbooks on mammals of the Palaearctic and In- domalayan Regions and the World, he has demonstrated his interest in African mammals by careful revisions of hedgehogs, hyraxes. and elephant shrews. He also de- scribed the now probably extinct Nigerian pygmy hip- popotamus (Corbet 1969). A new record of Sylvisorex ollula from Nigeria The presumed record of 5. ollula from Nigeria (Hutter- er et al. 1992) is no longer valid, after our study revealed that the voucher specimen represents a different species described here as new. However, Sylvisorex ollula does occur in Nigeria, as a new yet unrecorded specimen demonstrates. During a survey of small mammals of the Boje Forest at 290 m in the SW Obudu Mountains ( N, E), G. Nikolaus collected a male of 5. ollula on 13 January 1995. The specimen (ZFMK Fig. 5) is much smaller than S. corbeti n. sp. and agrees well with typical S. ollula in size (Table 1) and shape of skull (Fig. 5). 4. DISCUSSION The discoveiy of Sylvisorex corbeti n. sp. fiarther enriches the morphological diversity of the genus, as previously summarized by Hutterer (1985) and Hutterer & ScHLiTTER (1996). With a body mass of 30 g it marks the upper limit of the genus. The new species shows a unique combination of characters of a terrestrial forest shrew (large body, tail of medium length, ear conch of moderate size) with those of scansorial shrews (elongated limbs). The digits of the hindfoot (expressed by the length of metatarsal III) are even longer than in Sylviso)-ex megalura (Fig. 6), a species known for its adaptation for climbing (V
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