INVESTIGADORES
AVILA luciano Javier
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Molecular phylogeny of the endemic South American lizard clade Leiosaurae
Autor/es:
MORANDO, M.; AVILA, L.J.; BAKER, E.; SITES, J.W., JR.
Lugar:
Vancouver
Reunión:
Congreso; VII World Congress of Herpetology; 2012
Institución organizadora:
World Congress of Herpetology
Resumen:
The clade Leiosaurae is distributed mainly in southern Argentina, with few representatives in Chile. This poorly-known group includes three genera: Pristidactylus , Leiosaurus and Diplolaemus . Pristidactylus includes ten species, four of which are associated with Nothofagus forests in Chile, while the six Argentinean species range from along the eastern side of the Andes to the mountains of Cordillera and Precordillera, extending across the flat dry Monte habitats, and along the Atlantic coast and reaching the isolated meadows atop the Sierra de la Ventana. Significant differences in meristic characters distinguish Argentinian from Chilean species of Pristidactylus . The genus Leiosaurus includes four described species, three in northwestern Argentina ( L. catamarcensis , L. paronae, L. jaguaris ) and one in Patagonia ( L. bellii ). The genus Diplolaemus includes four species, D. bibronii in coastal regions and arid mesetas of southern Patagonia, D. darwinii also in southernmost Argentina and reaching small area in Chile, D. sexcinctus in north- central Patagonian Argentina, and D. leopardinus associated with the Andean slopes in northern western Argentina and a small area in Chile. Natural history knowledge of these species is very scarce, and unresolved taxonomic problems remain. Some phylogenetic hypotheses have been proposed based on morphological and mitochondrial characters, but with very few representatives (Frost et al 2001), and morphological and myological characters (Abdala et al 2009). In this work we include most of the described species (14 of 18) with representatives from their type localities, and we use Urostrophus vautieri as the outgroup. W e used two mitochondrial and eight nuclear genes (7749bp) to infer phylogenetic relationships. The phylogenetic hypotheses of the Bayesian tree shows that Diplolaemus is monophyletic, with Diplolaemus darwinii as the most basal and very distinct lineage, and D. bibronii sister to D. leopardinus . Leiosaurus is strongly supported as monophyletic, with L. bellii as the most basal species and L. catamarcensis sister to L. jaguaris . While we found evidence for the monophyly of the Argentinean Pristidactylus species, P. torquatus from Chile is not recovered within this clade and is the sister taxon of Leiosaurus . We discuss the taxonomic implications of our results