A new species of Cyrtodactylus Gray, 1827 (Squamata, Gekkonidae) from southwestern Yunnan, China

Abstract

A new species of the Cyrtodactylus chauquangensis species group is described based on four specimens collected from the karst formations of Menglian County, Puer City, Yunnan Province, China. The new species can be separated from all other congeners by having a unique combination of morphological characters: a medium-sized body; ventrolateral folds present with interspersed small tubercles; seven precloacal pores in a continuous series in males, absent in females; enlarged femoral scales and femoral pores absent; two postcloacal tubercles on each side; and one or two rows of enlarged subcaudals. Genetically, the new species most closely related to C. wayakonei and the uncorrected sequence divergences of the ND2 gene and its flanking tRNAs between the new species and investigated congeners range from 7.2% to 18.4%.

A new species of the Cyrtodactylus chauquangensis group (Squamata, Gekkonidae) from the borderlands of extreme northern Thailand

“…The topology of the tree generated herein is similar to that of Liu and Rao (2022) based on their codon partitioned ML and BI although they recovered five deep nodes with no support as opposed three unsupported nodes herein. The topologies of these trees were inconsistent with that of Chomdej et al (2022) which used one substitution model for both genes (ND2 and tRNA) in their ML and BI analyses and did not recover the chauquangensis group as monophyletic.…”

A new species of the Cyrtodactylus chauquangensis species group (Squamata, Gekkonidae) from Lao Cai Province, Vietnam

“… Grismer et al (2021a , 2021b ) provided a taxonomic review and analyzed phylogenetic relationships of 17 species and one undescribed form from northern Thailand. The group currently contains 23 recognized species with several taxa recently discovered from Yunnan Province, southern China ( Grismer et al 2021a , 2021b , 2021c ; Liu and Rao 2021 , 2022 ).…”