Atlas der Säugetiere Nordrhein-Westfalens

Schabrackenspitzmaus

514 entries

Crowned shrew

Rote Liste NRW: u Ungefährdet

  entry

Sorex coronatus

The Crowned Shrew was only recognized relatively late as its own species, even though several forgotten names for it existed. Ernst von Lehmann discovered the species in the 1950s in the Voreifel Region south of Bonn, and parallel to that, other researchers in Great Britain and in the Switzerland established that Common Shrew and Crowned Shrew were separate but exteriorly deceptively similar species. Chromosomes played a decisive role in the discovery. In fact, the two species are hardly distinguishable without examining small details on the skull.
However, adult Crowned Shrews in the winter coat show a sharp dividing line, which separated the whitish underside from the dark-brown upper side. Thus, in the ideal case, they can be distinguished from the more uniform Common Shrews but not with absolutely certainty.

In NRW, the Crowned Shrew occurs commonly in all of Rhineland and in the western Westphalia. A piece of their eastern distributional limit runs through Eastern Westphalia. The habitats are quite similar to those of the Common Shrew, but the Crowned Shrew is less frequent in higher elevations; here the Common Shrew dominates.

Author

Rainer Hutterer

Citation

Hutterer R (2025): Schabrackenspitzmaus (Sorex_coronatus).In: AG Säugetierkunde NRW — Online-Atlas of the mammals of North Rhine-Westphalia. Downloaded from saeugeratlas-nrw.lwl.org on 2025/04/01