Gray Mouse Lemur - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

As its name implies, the gray mouse lemur is a lemur, a type of primate, and belongs to the suborder Strepsirrhini and infraorder Lemuriformes. Within Lemuriformes, it belongs to the family Cheirogaleidae, which contains the mouse lemurs, dwarf lemurs, giant mouse lemurs, fork-marked lemurs, and hairy-eared dwarf lemur. The mouse lemur genus Microcebus includes the smallest primates in the world. Phylogenetic analyses of D-loop DNA sequences of various lemur species suggests that the gray mouse lemur may be most closely related to the reddish-gray mouse lemur (M. griseorufus).

First described in 1777 by English illustrator John Frederick Miller, M. murinus remained the only species of its genus, as well as the name used for all mouse lemurs on Madagascar, between the first major taxonomic revision in 1931 and an extensive field study conducted in 1972. The field study distinguished the brown mouse lemur, M. rufus—then considered a subspecies—as a distinct, sympatric species in the southeastern part of the island. Upon this revision, the gray mouse lemur was thought to account for all mouse lemurs that lived in the drier parts of the north, west, and south, while the brown mouse lemur represented the eastern rainforest mouse lemurs. More recently, scientific understanding of the distribution and diversity of the mouse lemurs has become much more complex. Additional field studies, genetic testing, and resulting taxonomic revisions throughout the 1990s and 2000s identified numerous new mouse lemur species, demonstrating that the genus includes at least 17 cryptic species.