User:Gaff/sandbox

"There are three genera of North American pocket gophers". Others occur in Mexico, which is commonly considered part of North America.

"It is one of five species in the subgenus Megascapheus". Seven according to more recent listings; ITIS is missing Thomomys nayarensis and Thomomys sheldoni. In general I wouldn't consider ITIS a reliable source for current taxonomy.

You mention in passing that a vole species is also endemic to the Willamette Valley. Is there any discussion in the sources of why certain small mammal species are endemic to this valley? That sounds like an interesting piece of biogeography.

* That is the gray-tailed vole, which is an article I wrote and promoted to GA status, hopefully eventually also FA. It has also been found across the Columbia River in Clark County Washington, so I need to fix that statement about endemic to Willamette Valley only. The best book I have seen on biogeography of the region is by Bailey, Vernon (1936): The Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon. I'll have to sort out how to incorporate species specific information on how this pertains to the Camas gopher, but it is an interesting topic. Oregon geography is fascinating. --Gaff (talk) 05:20, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

References:

"Allen, Joel Asaph (1893). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History (PDF). The Museum. Retrieved 27 November 2014." This should be cited as a journal article (with the article title and volume number).

* fixed. --Gaff (talk) 05:09, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Similarly for Coues (1875).
Elliot (1905) was published by the Field Columbian Museum (=Field Museum of Natural History), not the AMNH. Also, it should probably cite a serial title. My own database cites it as "Elliot, D.G. 1905. A checklist of mammals of the North American continent, the West Indies, and the neighboring seas. Field Columbian Museum, Zoölogical Series 6:1–761."
Merriam (1895) is a North American Fauna article and should be cited similar to Bailey (1915).

Possible additional sources:

http://biostor.org/reference/82822 is interesting historically but doesn't seem to add to the account given in the article.

Elftman, H.O. 1931. Pleistocene mammals of Fossil Lake, Oregon. American Museum Novitates 481:1–21. Writes that the fossil Thomomys from Fossil Lake, Oregon, was identified as T. bulbivorus by Cope in 1883 and 1889. That identification was overturned by 1902 though.

Whitaker, J.O., Jr., Walters, B.L., Castor, L.K., Ritzi, C.M. and Wilson, N. 2007. Host and distribution lists of mites (Acari), parasitic and phoretic, in the hair or on the skin of North American wild mammals north of Mexico: records since 1974. Faculty Publications from the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology 1:1–173. Lists mites of T. bulbivorus as Androlaelaps geomys (but not A. fahrenholzi, contra your source) and Echinonyssus femoralis (p. 15 and p. 16 respectively).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1380397 is the only information I've been able to find so far on the species's phylogenetic relationships. It claims that it is sister to a group of T. bottae, T. townsendii, and T. umbrinus, which would make this a relatively ancient species. It would be nice to confirm this with more recent genetic data.