Soriculus is a genus of shrew native to the Himalayas, the adjacent Hengduan Mountains and surrounding areas. There was historically only one recognised species, Soriculus nigrescens (as other extant species previously assigned to the genus had been transferred to other genera), though in 2023 and 2024 additional living species of the genus were proposed.
GENUS
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Soriculus is a genus of shrew native to the Himalayas, the adjacent Hengduan Mountains and surrounding areas. There was historically only one recognised species, Soriculus nigrescens (as other extant species previously assigned to the genus had been transferred to other genera), though in 2023 and 2024 additional living species of the genus were proposed.
==Taxonomy== The genus Soriculus is placed within the tribe Nectogalini. Several former species of the genus has been moved to other genera such as Chodsigoa and Episoriculus. Species from the extinct European genus Asoriculus were also included here at one point. Currently the genus contains the extinct species Soriculus kashmiriensis and Soriculus kubinyi, although in its description S. kashmiriensis was noted for being most closely related to species now placed in the genus Chodsigoa. DNA research has confirmed the close relationship of Soriculus with the recently extinct Asoriculus and Nesiotites shrews from Europe.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).