We infer phylogenetic relationships within Teioidea, a superfamily of Nearctic and Neotropical lizards, using nucleotide sequences. Phylogenetic analyses relied on parsimony under tree‐alignment and similarity‐alignment, with length variation (i.e. gaps) treated as evidence and as absence of evidence, and maximum‐likelihood under similarity‐alignment with gaps as absence of evidence. All analyses produced almost completely resolved trees despite 86% of missing data. Tree‐alignment produced the shortest trees, the strict consensus of which is more similar to the maximum‐likelihood tree than to any of the other parsimony trees, in terms of both number of clades shared, parsimony cost and likelihood scores. Comparisons of tree costs suggest that the pattern of indels inferred by similarity‐alignment drove parsimony analyses on similarity‐aligned sequences away from more optimal solutions. All analyses agree in a majority of clades, although they differ from each other in unique ways, suggesting that neither the criterion of optimality, alignment nor treatment of indels alone can explain all differences. Parsimony rejects the monophyly of Gymnophthalmidae due to the position of Alopoglossinae relative to Teiidae, whereas support of Gymnophthalmidae by maximum‐likelihood was low. We address various nomenclatural issues, including Gymnophthalmidae Fitzinger, 1826 being an older name than Teiidae Gray, 1827. We recognize three families in the arrangement Alopoglossidae + (Teiidae + Gymnophthalmidae). Within Gymnophthalmidae we recognize Cercosaurinae, Gymnophthalminae, Rhachisaurinae and Riolaminae in the relationship Cercosaurinae + (Rhachisaurinae + (Riolaminae + Gymnophthalminae)). Cercosaurinae is composed of three tribes—Bachiini, Cercosaurini and Ecpleopodini—and Gymnophthalminae is composed of three—Gymnophthalmini, Heterodactylini and Iphisini. Within Teiidae we retain the currently recognized three subfamilies in the arrangement: Callopistinae + (Tupinambinae + Teiinae). We also propose several genus‐level changes to restore the monophyly of taxa.

No abstract

Goicoechea, N., De La Riva, I. & Padial, J. M. (2010). Recovering phylogenetic signal from frog mating calls.-Zoologica Scripta, 39, 141-154.Few studies have tried to analyse the phylogenetic information contained in frog mating calls. While some of those studies suggest that sexual selection deletes any phylogenetic signal, others indicate that frog calls do retain phylogenetic informative characters. Discordant results can be the outcome of disparate rates of character evolution and evolutionary plasticity of call characters in different groups of frogs, but also the result of applying different coding methods. No study to date has compared the relative performance of different coding methods in detecting phylogenetic signal in calls, hampering thus potential consilience between previous results. In this study, we analyse the strength of phylogenetic signal in 10 mating call characters of 11 related species of frogs belonging to three genera of Andean and Amazonian frogs (Anura: Terrarana: Strabomantidae). We use six quantitative characters (number of notes per call, note length, call length, number of pulses per note, fundamental frequency and dominant frequency) and four qualitative ones (presence ⁄ absence of: pseudopulses, frequency modulation in notes, amplitude modulation in notes and amplitude modulation in pulses). We code quantitative characters using four different coding and scaling methods: (i) gap-coding, (ii) fixed-scale, (iii) step-matrix gapweighting with between-characters scaling, and (iv) step-matrix gap-weighting with between-states scaling. All four coding methods indicate that frog calls contain phylogenetic information. These results suggest that divergent selection on frog mating calls may not always be strong enough to eliminate phylogenetic signal. However, coding methods strongly affect the amount of recoverable information.Step-matrix gap-weighting with between-characters scaling and gap-coding are suggested as the best methods available for coding quantitative characters of frog calls. Also, our results indicate that the arbitrariness in selecting character states and the method for scaling transitions weights, rather than the number of character states, is what potentially biases phylogenetic analyses with quantitative characters.

A taxonomic revision of Proctoporus bolivianus Werner (Squamata: Gymnophthalmidae) with the description of three new species and resurrection of