Phylogenetic Systematics of Dart-Poison Frogs and Their Relatives Revisited (Anura: Dendrobatoidea)

Abstract

Abstract. Despite the impressive growth of knowledge on the phylogenetic systematics of dart-poison frogs and their relatives (Dendrobatoidea) over the past decade, many problems remain to be addressed. We analyzed up to 189 phenomic characters (morphology, behavior, defensive chemicals) and 15 mitochondrial and nuclear loci scored for 564 dendrobatoid and outgroup terminals, including 76 newly sequenced terminals and > 20 previously unanalyzed species, using tree-alignment and the parsimony optimality criterion in the program POY v.5.1.1 and additional analyses of the implied alignment using TNT v.1.5. Even though data coverage was highly heterogeneous, the strict consensus of 639 optimal trees is highly resolved and we detected only one instance of wildcard behavior involving a small clade of outgroup species. The monophyly of the median lingual process (MLP) possessing genus Anomaloglossus is decisively refuted, with the cis-Andean species being sister to Rheobates within Aromobatidae and the trans-And...