CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Lizards of the genus Liolaemus are one of the most diverse groups of vertebrates in southern South America. The most diverse group within the genus is the subgenus Liolaemus, also referred as chiliensis group, which includes several species we refer to as Liolaemus elongatus-kriegi complex (L. elongatus, L. petrophilus, L. ceii, L. kriegi, L. buergeri, L. austromendocinus, L. capillitas, L. heliodermis, L. thermarum. L. leopardinus, L. curis, and some undescribed taxa). The objectives of this work are to study the evolution of various species groups within this complex, determining species boundaries, their shallow and deep phylogenetic relationships, and then to infer speciation processes in the eastern arid slopes of Andean and Patagonia landscapes of Argentina in relation to geological and climatic events. We used 199 individuals from this complex and 9 outgroups. We used a combined approach with traditional methods for phylogeny reconstruction and statistical parsimony methods for intraspecific phylogenies. As genetic markers we used regions of the cyt-b, ND4 and 12S mitochondrial genes. We present phylogenetic relationships of this complex, and discuss the species boundaries for populations of three main groups within it, L. petrophilus group (with two different lineages within it), L. elongatus group (with four separate entities), and L. kriegi group (with at least two separate lineages). For the L. elongatus and L. kriegi groups, the differentiation was greatest in the northern Patagonian clades, where the effects of more intense geological (vulcanology) and climatic events (glaciation) could have lead to a more rapid differentiation of these populations. The differentiation of the L. petrophilus populations presents a different pattern from the other two groups.

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