“…The five species of the P. signifer Group already karyotyped (i.e., P. atlanticus, P. crombiei, P. moreirae, P. spiniger and P. signifer) have a telocentric chromosome pair as the smallest pair (chromosome pair 11) of the complement (de Lucca et al, 1974;Silva et al, 2000;Ananias et al, 2007), as do P. nattereri (Beçak, 1968;Lourenço et al, 2006;Ananias et al, 2007) and P. deimaticus (present work), which is the only species of the P. deimaticus Group karyotyped to date. In contrast, the remaining 23 species of Physalaemus studied cytogenetically have a biarmed chromosome pair 11 (Beçak et al, 1970;Denaro, 1972;de Lucca et al, 1974;Silva et al, 1999Silva et al, , 2000Amaral et al, 2000;Quinderé et al, 2009;Tomatis et al, 2009;Milani et al, 2010;Nascimento et al, 2010;Provete et al, 2012;Vittorazzi et al, 2014), except for P. fernandezae ). The phylogenetic relationships inferred herein provide strong evidence for the independent origin of the telocentric chromosome 11 of P. fernandezae and the chromosome 11 of species previously allocated to the P. signifer Group, corroborating the hypothesis discussed by Tomatis et al (2009).…”