Michael Clegg's Yorkshire House Mice: A tale of tails

摘要

Since the original Linnean classification of the familiar House Mouse as Mus musculus in 1758, Marshall & Sage (1981) have combined classical morphological techniques with electrophoretic studies of enzymes and proteins to show that at least seven species are incorporated within the original M. musculus. Four of these, M. musculus, M. domesticus, M. spretus and M. abbotti occur in Europe (Berry, 1981). M. domesticus Rutty 1772 is the form which occurs in the British Isles and extends from adjacent parts of Western Europe to the Near East via the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. It is the most widely distributed form, which could be due either to its innate characteristics or merely to the historical accident of its association with Neolithic man in cereal-growing sites in the Near East, M. domesticus being spread by human cultures via the expansion of cereal cultivation and consumption (Berry, 1981).