A new species of geckos of the genus Cyrtodactylus Gray, 1827 from Arunachal Pradesh, India

Abstract

We here describe a new species of bent-toed geckos from the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is widespread across the Dafla and Mishmi hills, occurring at elevations ranging from 179 m to 1400 m. The new species is recovered as sister to the Cyrtodactylus khasiensis clade based on a molecular phylogeny inferred from mitochondrial NADH-ubiquinone oxidoreductase, subunit 2 gene. Intraspecific uncorrected pairwise sequence divergence (p-distance) for the new species was found to be between 0 and 5%, whereas the interspecific divergence from the closely-related congeners was between 19 and 30%. The new species can be differentiated from members of the C. khasiensis clade using a suite of morphological characters: moderate body size (SVL 64.9–81.7); 8–11 supralabials; 8–10 infralabials; 24–26 bluntly conical, feebly keeled dorsal tubercles; 50–60 paravertebral tubercles; ~38 ventral scales between ventrolateral folds; no precloacal groves; 6–10 precloacofemoral pores in a continuous series; 10–16 distal subdigital lamellae on IV of pes; subcaudal scalation of original tail without enlarged plates. This is the fourth reptile species described from Arunachal Pradesh from the expedition led by the team, and this further highlights the need for further herpetological investigations into the region.

A new species of Bent-toed gecko (Squamata: Gekkonidae: Cyrtodactylus Gray, 1827) from the Garo Hills, Meghalaya State, north-east India, and discussion of morphological variation for C. urbanus

“…Comparing with what is known of other north-east Indian Cyrtodactylus species, besides C. tripuraensis which has been reported from several localities in Tripura State (Agarwal et al, 2018b) and adjacent Bangladesh (Al-Razi et al, 2018), and C. arunachalensis with a known distribution extending ca. 350 km along the Brahmaputra Valley (Mirza et al, 2021), Cyrtodactylus bapme sp. nov. is the third most widespread species of this genus in northeast India.…”

“…33256/31.3.177196 et al (2021) described C. arunachalensis Mirza, Bhosale, Ansari, Phansalkar, Sawant, Gowande and Patel, 2021, a widely distributed species from Arunachal Pradesh State. Thirteen, mostly range restricted species are now known to occur in north-east India (Jerdon, 1870;Annandale, 1906Annandale, , 1913Agarwal et al, 2018bAgarwal et al, , 2018cPurkayastha et al, 2020a;Mirza et al, 2021), and all bar one, C. tripuraensis Agarwal, Mahony, Giri, Chaitanya and Bauer, 2018, are considered endemic to India (Al-Razi et al, 2018). In this paper we provide a taxonomic study on Cyrtodactylus populations from the East Garo Hills, West Garo Hills and Ri Bhoi districts of Meghalaya, resulting in the discovery of a new species of Cyrtodactylus from forested habitat in the Garo Hills (Fig.…”

A new ancient lineage of ablepharine skinks (Sauria: Scincidae) from eastern Himalayas with notes on origin and systematics of the group

“…nov . described in the present work represents the fifth new reptile species discovered and described from a single rapid survey (see Bhosale, Gowande & Mirza, 2019 ; Bhosale et al, 2020 ; Mirza et al, 2020 , 2021 ). Additionally four species of snakes were described from other areas in Arunachal Pradesh just in the last 2 years ( Captain et al, 2019 ; Purkayastha & David, 2019 ; Das et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Liver/tail tip tissues were collected for molecular work and stored in molecular grade ethanol prior to specimen fixation. The specimens have been deposited in the collection of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), Mumbai and the Research Collection Facility of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore ( Mirza et al, 2020 , 2021 ).…”

“…For optimal partitioning strategy and evolutionary substitution model, the aligned data was analyzed using PartitionFinder v. 1.1.1 ( Lanfear et al, 2012 ), implementing a greedy search algorithm under the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Molecular phylogenetic analysis follows methods described by Mirza et al (2020 , 2021) . The aligned dataset was subject to phylogenetic inference using IQ-TREE ( ) online portal ( Minh et al, 2020 ).…”