7# o&73 Vol. 76, pp. 85-88 3 April 1963 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON THE NOMENCLATURE OF SOUTH AMERICAN PECCARIES By Philip Hershkovitz Chicago Natural History Museum According to Cabrera (1961: 316), the name for the white-lipped peccary, Tayassu pecari G. Fischer, 1814, is a junior homonym of Sus pecari Link, 1795. The latter, in the opinion of the same authority, is based on a collared peccary described by Buff on in volume 10 of the Histoire Naturelle . . . (1763: 21, pis. 3, 4, 13). Consequently, Cabrera replaced Tayassu pecari G. Fischer with Tayassu albirostris Illiger, 1815. Although Cabrera's judgments in nomenclatorial matters are rarely ques-tioned, his present conclusions appear to be without foundation. First, Tayassu pecari G. Fischer is obviously no homonym of Sus pecari Link. Second, T. pecari G. Fischer and S. pecari Link are actually objective synonyms, both being based on the same white-lipped peccary originally described by Buffon in sup-plementary volume 3 of the Histoire Naturelle . . . (1776: 92-94 ) , as shown below. Fischer (1814: 284-287) erected the genus Tayassu for the two living American species of peccaries, as follows: [p. 284] "68. TAYASSU. [description follows] [p. 285] "Pecari. 1. T[ayassu] corpore nigro, maxilla inferior alba, [synonymy follows] [p. 287] "patira. 2. T[ayassu] corpore nigro, fascia humerali alba, [synonymy follows]." The full synonymy of Tayassu pecari given by Fischer is a composite of white-lipped and collared peccaries. The diagnosis, however, refers spe-cifically to the white-lipped form described in the Sonnini edition of Buffon (1800, 27: 93 [but see p. 101]) as well as the white-lipped peccary, or tagnicati, of Azara ( 1801 : 25 ) . T. patira, also based on the Sonnini edi-tion of Buffon ( loc. cit. ) , is clearly the collared peccary. In his classification of mammals, Link ( 1795: 104) employed the then current generic name Sus for the known species of suiforms, as follows: 11— Proc. Biol. Soc. Wash., Vol. 76, 1963 ( 85 )
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