In the present study, in order to study the phylogeography and subspecies classification of P. leucogenys, but they did not find any geographically specific features. Oshida and Obara (1993) reported the variation of constitutive heterochromatin of chromosomes in P. However, little information about the phylogeography of P. leucogenys has been studied in detail ( Baba et al., 1982 Ando and Imaizumi, 1982 Ando and Shiraishi, 1983 Kawamichi, 1997a 1997b 1998), and cyto-genetic information on this species has also been reported by Oshida and Obara (1991 1993) and Oshida and Yoshida (1999a 1999b). At present, however, the validity of his classification is uncertain, as there are variations of pelage in P. leucogenys into three subspecies: leucogenys, nikkonis, and oreas.
Based on characteristics of their pelage, Imaizumi (1960) classified P. Although Corbet and Hill (1980) explained that this species is distributed throughout Japan and central China, they more recently treated the central Chinese population as a distinct species Petaurista xanthotis ( Corbet and Hill, 1991 1992). The Japanese giant flying squirrel Petaurista leucogenys is a mammalian species indigenous to the Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu Islands of Japan ( Corbet and Hill, 1991 Nowak, 1991). Genetic distances in Group C were not related to geographic distances between sampling localities, indicating that ancestral populations of this group recently expanded their distribution in a short time, possibly after the last glacial stage. Animals with the Kyushu haplotypes were split into two lineages (Groups A and B), suggesting that Group A diverged at an earlier point from the other groups. leucogenys is essentially separated into three major lineages: Group A consisting of a single haplotype from Kyushu, Group B consisting of some haplotypes from Kyushu and one haplotype from Honshu, and Group C consisting mostly of haplotypes from Honshu and Shikoku. Phylogenetic relationships reconstructed using neighbor-joining and maximum parsimony methods indicated that P.
All haplotypes from Kyushu consisted of 1,052 bases, whereas those from Honshu and Shikoku consisted of 1,054 bases including two insertions, except for three haplotypes (which had 1,052 or 1,053 bases). Of the 37 animals examined, 24 haplotypes were identified. To investigate genetic diversity among populations of the Japanese giant flying squirrel Petaurista leucogenys, the mitochondrial DNA control region sequences (1,052–1,054 bases) were determined in 37 specimens from 17 localities on the Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu Islands of Japan.