Range Description

Moschiola meminna, as used here, is endemic to the dry zone of Sri Lanka: localities listed in Groves and Meijaard (2005: 421) suggest that it may well occur throughout this zone. This covers most of the island, except for the southwestern quarter and the central mountain range (Pocock 1939). Previous to the taxonomic revision of Groves and Meijaard (2005), no effort was made to distinguish Sri Lankan chevrotains into different forms, and so past records other than the specimens Groves and Meijaard (2005) analysed cannot be retrospectively, objectively, assigned to this species in its current taxonomic sense. No published records additional to Groves and Meijaard (2005) and following their suggested taxonomy were traced. Objective identification (i.e. not solely on the basis of habitat and location) of further animals at various localities within the island is required to test the hypothesis of Groves and Meijaard (2005) of a strict segregation of habitat between this species and M. kathygre; these authors stressed their “admittedly small sample sizes”. Currently it would therefore be rash for species-level identification to be assigned to individuals under the Groves and Meijaard (2005) taxonomic hypothesis solely on the basis of habitat.