Abstract
The species Proceratophrys cristiceps belongs to the genus Proceratophrys within the family Cycloramphidae. These amphibians are found exclusively in South America in the morphoclimatic domain of the semi-arid depression zones in northeastern Brazil known as the Caatinga. We examined intrapopulational variation using univariate and multivariate statistics with traditional and geometric morphometrics, which supported the existence of two morphotypes of this species. Our results indicated significant degrees of variation in skeletal characteristics between some natural populations of this species. Careful analyses of variability levels are fundamental to avoid taxonomic errors, principally in populations that demonstrate characteristics intimately associated with their area of occurrence, as is the case of Proceratophrys cristiceps.
Highlights
Individuals of the species Proceratophrys cristiceps (Muller, 1883) are found exclusively in the inter-montane depression zones and interplain semi-arid regions known collectively as the caatinga region [1]
Significant differences were observed when comparing the linear equations of the regression lines for the variables snoutvent length (SVL) and DNR (Table 2), but not for SVL and eye-nostril distance (END)
Two basic types of variation can be considered from an evolutionary point of view [9]: group variation, which refers to differences between populations; and individual variation, which considers the differences between individuals of a single population
Summary
Individuals of the species Proceratophrys cristiceps (Muller, 1883) are found exclusively in the inter-montane depression zones and interplain semi-arid regions known collectively as the caatinga (dryland) region [1]. These amphibians are classified within the family Cycloramphidae [2] and belong to the genus Proceratophrys MirandaRibeiro, 1920, together with 18 other species distributed within different exclusively South American morpho-climatic domains. The species P. cristiceps was originally described based on external morphological characteristics as well as some skeletal features [3]. Two basic color patterns can be observed in P. cristiceps that always appear sympatrically throughout their range in the caatinga, a characteristic common to some other species of the same genus
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