Costa & Leite , 2013 ( Mammalia , Rodentia , Erethizontidae ) in northeastern Brazil : Filling gaps in its geographical distribution

Coendou speratus Mendes Pontes, Gadelha, Melo, Sa, Loss, Caldara Jr., Costa & Leite, 2013 is a recently described Neotropical prehensile-tailed porcupine from the Atlantic Forest of northeastern Brazil. It is known only from the Pernambuco Centre of Endemism. Here we present a new locality record, in the Estacao Ecologica Murici (ESEC Murici), Municipality of Murici, Alagoas State, Brazil, 105 km southeast of the type locality and 60 km west from the closest record (from more than 50 yr ago), in Municipality of Vicosa, also in Alagoas State.

discoverers, the new species is probably endemic to the Pernambuco Centre of Endemism (sensu Silva and Casteleti 2003), a biogeographic unit of the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest located north of the São Francisco River, which encompasses the states of Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte.However, C. speratus was not found during five years of surveys, since 2002, in 23 other remnants of Atlantic Forest in the State of Pernambuco (Mendes Pontes et al. 2013).
Coendou speratus can be diagnosed mainly by the brownish red tips of the dorsal quills, ventral surface covered with soft fur, condylar and coronoid processes of the mandible about the same height with a shallow and squarish sigmoid notch, and auditory bullae inflated anteriorly and kidney-shaped.Beside these characters, C. speratus differs from C. baturitensis and C. prehensilis by the absence of pneumatization of the nasofrontal region, which reflects on a flat dorsal profile (on a lateral view), and incisive and premaxillae not projected forward (Feijó and Langguth 2013;Mendes Pontes et al. 2013).
In this paper we report a new record of C. speratus and expand the known distribution of the species to about 105 km south from its type locality (Figure 1).A specimen from the vicinities of Viçosa, also in Alagoas State (60 km west from the new record), was collected in the 1950s during the National Plague Service ("Serviço Nacional da Peste"-SNP) and housed at the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.Besides having no collecting data or catalog number, the specimen, an adult female, was identified as C. speratus (Mendes Pontes et al. 2013).Our finding confirms not only the occurrence but the survival of this species in Alagoas State after more than 50 yr of human negative impacts on the local Atlantic Forest and, consequently, on its fauna.
According to Veloso et al. (1991), the vegetation cover in the area is classified as Submontane Open Humid Atlantic Rain Forest.It is considered one of the largest remnants and most important protected areas of Atlantic Forest above São Francisco River (Brasil-MMA 2002).
External and craniodental morphological features of the collected specimen were compared to the description of C. speratus by Mendes Pontes et al. (2013) to confirm species identification.Age classification follows Voss (2011) andCaldara Jr. andLeite (2012).These authors used maxillary tooth eruption, cranial suture closure, and pelage maturation to define four heuristic ages for the genus: juvenile, subadult, adult and old adult.The specimen collected consists of a juvenile-specified by "maxillary dentition incomplete (three or fewer teeth erupted); cranial sutures still open and pelage often conspicuously immature, including long fur even in species that lack visible fur as adults" (Voss, 2011)-male (MUFAL 0048= ALN 211) (Figure 2) that was found at 08:00 AM on 21 June 2013, on a tree 5 m off the ground on the edge of the forest.We pulled the tree's branch toward ourselves and carefully caught the animal.
Besides skull and stuffed skin, we also collected liver tissue (preserved in 98% ethanol), quills that fell during post mortem manipulation and ectoparasites (preserved in 70% ethanol).Everything, including the skeleton, skull and paws, is deposited at Mammal Collection at the Museu de História Natural of the Universidade Federal de Alagoas, as MUFAL 0048.
The ESEC Murici is a Federal Conservation Unit (UC) and an important area of endemism for amphibians, reptiles and birds, and is considered of extreme biological importance for mammal conservation (Conservation International do Brasil et al. 2000).Despite these points, this UC and its fauna suffer from human negative impacts, such as hunting, cattle raising, culture of manioc, banana and sugar cane.The finding we report in this note highlights the limited information about this porcupine species, and the need for further surveys and conservation efforts in this and other remnants of the northeastern Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Distribution records of Coendou speratus showing type locality (white triangle) and locality of the paratypes (black circles), in Usina Trapiche, State of Pernambuco; the other known record, from Viçosa, Alagoas State (black square) and the new record (white star) in ESEC Murici, Alagoas State.The white line represents the Caatinga/Atlantic Forest boundary.