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| Neblinaphryne mayeri Caligophryne doylei Fouquet, Kok, Recoder, Prates, Camacho, Marques-Souza, Ghellere, McDiarmid & Rodrigues, 2024 |
Highlights:
• We discovered two new frog species from the Neblina massif, Pantepui.
• Both species represent deeply rooted new lineages within Brachycephaloidea.
• Morphological data also support the creation of two new family and genus-level taxa.
• These results confirm the role of “museum” played by Pantepui during Cenozoic.
Abstract
The iconic mountains of the Pantepui biogeographical region host many early-diverging endemic animal and plant lineages, concurring with Conan Doyle’s novel about an ancient “Lost World”. While this is the case of several frog lineages, others appear to have more recent origins, adding to the controversy around the diversification processes in this region. Due to its remoteness, Pantepui is challenging for biological surveys, and only a glimpse of its biodiversity has been described, which hampers comprehensive evolutionary studies in many groups. During a recent expedition to the Neblina massif on the Brazil-Venezuela border, we sampled two new frog species that could not be assigned to any known genus. Here, we perform phylogenetic analyses of mitogenomic and nuclear loci to infer the evolutionary relationships of the new taxa and support their description. We find that both species represent single lineages deeply nested within Brachycephaloidea, a major Neotropical clade of direct-developing frogs. Both species diverged >45 Ma from their closest relatives: the first is sister to all other Brachycephaloidea except for Ceuthomantis, another Pantepui endemic, and the second is sister to Brachycephalidae, endemic to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. In addition to these considerable phylogenetic and biogeographic divergences, external morphology and osteological features support the proposition of two new family and genus-level taxa to accommodate these new branches of the amphibian tree of life. These findings add to other recently described ancient vertebrate lineages from the Neblina massif, providing a bewildering reminder that our perception of the Pantepui’s biodiversity remains vastly incomplete. It also provides insights into how these mountains acted as “museums” during the diversification of Brachycephaloidea and of Neotropical biotas more broadly, in line with the influential “Plateau theory”. Finally, these discoveries point at the yet unknown branches of the tree of life that may go extinct, due to global climate change and zoonotic diseases, before we even learn about their existence, amphibians living at higher elevations being particularly at risk.
Keywords: Amazonia, Biogeography, Guiana Shield, Neotropics, Phylogeny, Taxonomy
Class Amphibia Linnaeus, 1758.
Order Anura Duméril, 1805.
Superfamily Brachycephaloidea Günther, 1858.
Neblinaphrynidae fam. nov.
Neblinaphryne gen. nov.
Etymology. The generic name refers to the Pico da Neblina massif and is a combination of “neblina” meaning “fog” in Portuguese and Spanish, and “phryne”, meaning “toad” in Ancient Greek.
Neblinaphryne mayeri sp. nov.
Distribution. Known only from the Neblina massif, Pantepui, northeastern South America.
Etymology. The specific epithet mayeri is a noun in the genitive case, honoring General Sinclair James Mayer from the division “Sistema Defesa, Indústria e Academia” (SisDIA) of the Brazilian Army for his tireless work to provide logistical support and make the expedition to Pico da Neblina possible. Since then, General Mayer has promoted collaborations between the Army and our research group at the University of São Paulo, an effort that has already led to the collection of several species new to science from remote sites in Amazonia.
Caligophrynidae fam. nov.
Caligophryne gen. nov.
Etymology. The generic name is formed by “caligo”, a Latin word for “mist”, and “phryne”, a word meaning “toad” in Ancient Greek.
Caligophryne doylei sp. nov.
Etymology. The specific epithet doylei is a noun in the genitive case, honoring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his influential novel “The Lost World”, in which he depicted ancient creatures surviving until the present era on the isolated summit of a remote table-top mountain, like the frog we describe here.
Distribution. Known only from the Neblina massif, Pantepui, northeastern South America.
Antoine Fouquet, Philippe J. R. Kok, Renato Sousa Recoder, Ivan Prates, Agustin Camacho, Sergio Marques-Souza, José Mario Ghellere, Roy W. McDiarmid and Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues. 2024. Relicts in the Mist: Two New Frog Families, Genera and Species highlight the Role of Pantepui as A Biodiversity Museum throughout the Cenozoic. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. In Press, 107971. DOI: 10.1016/j.ympev.2023.107971
