Morphological traits and phylogenetic relationships among ranoid lineages

FABREZI, MARISSA; LOBO, FERNANDO JOSE

Stellenbosch, South Africa

Congreso; Fifth World Congress of Herpetology; 2005

University of Stellenbosch

Ranoidea is a monophyletic neobatracian group that includes lineages living in Africa, Eurasia and America. Relationships within these lineages are controversial and different hypotheses have been proposed based on morphological, molecular and ecological data set. Ranoids phylogeny is studied using 90 morphological characters of 45 taxa. Further, our analysis considers taxa of discoglossids (1), pipoids (3), pelobatoids (2), and bufonoids (30). The data set is analyzed applying maximum parsimony with two criteria: equally weighted character analysis and implied weighting method. We recover relationships between Hyperoliidae sensu lato and Arthroleptidae, both clada statistically well supported. Some African ranid lineages show acceptable values of support measures. Astylosternus appears more closed related to some ranids than artholeptids or hyperoliids as was proposed in other studies. In some analyses, Chiromantis is found nested within ranids and in others is related to microhylids plus hyperoliids-arthroleptids. Ranidae sensu lato results paraphyletic from equally weighted characters but monophyletic and basal respect to other ranoids with implied weighting method. Besides, this study provides a revision of those informative characters traditionally used in different hypotheses.