Homeless mammals from the Ionian and Aegean islands

摘要

The paper present information about several mammalian species reported erroneously from the Ionian and Aegean islands and the occurrence of stuffed specimens in museum collections which reveal intriguing stories about their origins, especially about the islands from which they were collected. According to scientific and popular literature, these islands were often not numbered among the original homelands, nor even the territories of the artificial distribution of the species. So it is almost impossible today to understand why and how certain specimens reached these islands, especially in the case of those which were dangerous predators for the livestock, and even humans. This is the case, for example, of the Asia Minor Leopard, Panther a pardus tulliana Valenciennes, 1856, which today figures among the collections of the Natural History Museum of the Aegean, in the village of Mytelenii on the island of Samos.