Neal Woodman, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

Variation in the forefoot skeleton of small-eared shrews (family Soricidae, genus Cryptotis) has been previously documented, but the paucity of available skeletons for most taxa makes assessment of the degrees of intraspecific and interspecific variation difficult. We used a digital X-ray system to extract images of the forefoot skeleton from 101 dried skins of eight taxa (seven species...

Fossils of Cryptotis goodwini from Honduras indicate that body sizes of modern individuals average at least 18% larger than among members of the late Pleistocene population of this species. Palynological and other paleoenvironmental studies provide evidence that the Neotropical montane environments that these shrews inhabit were cooler and drier in the late Pleistocene than at present...

Our study of mammalian remains excavated in the 1940s from McGrew Cave, north of Copán, Honduras, yielded an assemblage of 29 taxa that probably accumulated predominantly as the result of predation by owls. Among the taxa present are three species of small-eared shrews, genus Cryptotis. One species, Cryptotis merriami, is relatively rare among the fossil remains. The other two shrews...

No abstract available.

One of the traditional methods of determining the dietary preferences of owls relies upon the identification of bony remains of prey contained in regurgitated pellets. Discovery of a pellet containing a large, complete primary feather from an adult, male Ring-necked Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) prompted us to examine in detail a small sample of pellets from a Great Horned Owl (Bubo...

Variation in the forefoot skeleton of small-eared shrews (family Soricidae, genus Cryptotis) has been previously documented, but the paucity of available skeletons for most taxa makes assessment of the degrees of intraspecific and interspecific variation difficult. We used a digital X-ray system to extract images of the forefoot skeleton from 101 dried skins of eight taxa (seven species...

No abstract available.

The genus name Musaraneus often is attributed to Brisson (1762), however, most of Brisson's names are unavailable. Pomel (1848) subsequently made the name Musaraneus available, but did not designate a type species. The 18 species that Pomel listed under Musaraneus currently are distributed among five modern genera, two of which (Cryptotis Pomel, 1848 and Diplomesodon Brandt, 1852) are...

Cryptotis colombiana Woodman & Timm, 1993 previously was known from few specimens from two isolated regions in the Cordillera Central and Cordillera Oriental of Colombia. Recent collecting in the northern Cordillera Central and review of older collections from the central Cordillera Oriental in the vicinity of Bogota yielded additional specimens that permit reevaluation of the two...

The shaggy sac-winged bat, Centronycteris centralis, occurs mainly in lowland forests from Veracruz, Mexico, to Peru, although it has been reported from elevations as high at 1450 m in Panama. Most captures of the species are of single individuals, and throughout its distribution, this bat is rare and poorly-known. Centronycteris centralis generally has been assumed to be an aerial...

The Colombian small-eared shrew, Cryptotis colombiana Woodman and Timm, was described from the Colombian Andes in 1993. Its original allocation to the C. nigrescens group recently was questioned based on several cranial characters the species appeared to share with some members of the C. thomasi group. We review characteristics of the C. nigrescens and C. thomasi groups, and we describe...

No abstract available.