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Species richness under a vertebral stripe: integrative taxonomy uncovers three additional species of Pholidobolus lizards (Sauria, Squamata, Gymnophthalmidae) from the north-western Colombian Andes by Adolfo Amézquita; Luis A. Mazariegos-H; Santiago Cañaveral; Catalina Orejuela; Leidy Alejandra Barragán-Contreras; Juan M. Daza is a Agricultural and Biological Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Species richness under a vertebral stripe: integrative taxonomy uncovers three additional species of Pholidobolus lizards (Sauria, Squamata, Gymnophthalmidae) from the north-western Colombian Andes about?

The systematic study of biodiversity underlies appropriate inference in most other fields of biological research, yet it remains hampered by disagreements on both theoretical and empirical issues such as the species concept and the operational diagnosis of a species. Both become particularly challenging in those lineages where morphological traits are evolutionarily constrained by their adaptive value. For instance, cryptic organisms often conserve or converge in their external appearance, which hinders the recognition of species boundaries. An integrative approach has been adopted to study microgeographic variation in the leaf-litter lizard __Pholidobolus vertebralis__ and test three predictions derived from the evolutionary species concept. Molecular data provided unambiguous evidence of divergence among the three recovered new clades and a common evolutionary history for each of them. The broadly sympatric clades were indeed diagnosable from externally visible traits, such as head scales, adult size, and sexually dimorphic ventral colouration. Also, they barely overlapped on the phenotypic space that summarised 39 morphometric and meristic traits. These clades are described as t

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Author

Adolfo Amézquita; Luis A. Mazariegos-H; Santiago Cañaveral; Catalina Orejuela; Leidy Alejandra Barragán-Contreras; Juan M. Daza

Publisher

Pensoft Publishers

Published

2023

Language

EN

Field

Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)