University of Kansas Publications, Museum of Natural History
Editors: E. Raymond Hall, Chairman, Donald S. Farner,
Donald F. Hoffmeister
Volume 1, No. 1, pp. 1-82, 1 figure in text.
Published August 15, 1946
University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
PRINTED BY
FERD VOILAND, JR., STATE PRINTER
TOPEKA, KANSAS
1946
21-2786
The Pocket Gophers (Genus Thomomys) of Utah
By
STEPHEN D. DURRANT
Contribution from the Department of Biology, University of Utah, and the Museum of Natural History, University of Kansas.
INTRODUCTION
The history of pocket gophers of Utah begins with J. A. Allen's mention in 1874 of mounds of these animals. For them he employed the name "Thomomys rufescens?" (1874:65). Actual specimens were reported upon a year later by Elliot Coues (1875:251, 256), who used the name Thomomys talpoides for specimens from "Utah" but later in the same paper listed specimens from Provo as Thomomys talpoides bulbivorus. Even as the great variation in Utah pocket gophers has been perplexing to modern workers, so it was also to Coues seventy years ago who left the problem with the statement that animals from Provo "exhibit among themselves such variations that their labelling becomes a matter of indifference"! In the same year in another report, Coues and Yarrow (1875:112) used the name Thomomys talpoides umbrinus for animals from Provo. In 1877, Coues again referred these same animals to Thomomys talpoides bulbivorus, using the name umbrinus for the animals of only southern Utah (Coues, 1877:627, 628). The two names Thomomys bottae and Thomomys talpoides, now applicable to gophers in Utah, were synonomized under the name Thomomys talpoides bulbivorus by Coues (1875:256; 1877:627). After this beginning only three other papers, all by J. A. Allen, appeared in the next twenty years. They were reports on collections of mammals made by Walter W. Granger and Charles P. Rowley. One of these contained the description of Thomomys aureus. Likewise, in the ensuing twenty years there were only three papers, one in 1901 by C. Hart Merriam in which he described Thomomys uinta, one by Allen (1905:119), and Vernon Bailey's (1915) "Revision of the pocket gophers of the genus Thomomys" in which he summarized the information then available on these animals within the state. Barnes (1922 and 1927) reprinted the information summarized by Bailey. Since 1927 approximately twenty-five papers, mostly taxonomic, have been published in which reference is made to Utah gophers, and especially since 1930 much information has been accumulated about the distribution and speciation of this genus within the state.