Bufo thaul, Lesson 1830

Lavilla, Esteban O., Rabanal, Felipe E., Langone, José A., Vásquez, Dayana & Castro-Carrasco, Camila, 2019, The identity of the Chilean Amphibians collected by the United States exploring expedition, Zootaxa 4567 (1), pp. 183-192 : 185

Bufo thaul, Lesson 1830

(Figs. 3–4)

Girard (1858a) pointed out in the synonymy that the Bufo thaul he was redescribing was that of Lesson (1831) and not the Rana thaul described by Molina (1782). To add confusion to the intricacies of the name and its synonymy (see Ferraro & Lavilla 2013), what Girard (1858a, b) characterized and illustrated were juveniles. In fact, the redescription ( Girard 1858a: 88) starts: “ Out of nine specimens, collected by the Expedition, the largest was but one inch in total length, the legs excluded ...”. As far as we know, no species of amphibians with adults of such a small size were ever recorded in Valparaíso Region, and the description and illustration ( Girard 1858a; b, Plate 5, Figs. 15–19) clearly shows a juvenile Rhinella .

It is not possible to identify the specimens attributed by Girard to Bufo thaul . As noted above, three species of Rhinella inhabits Valparaíso area, R. arunco , R. atacamensis , and R. spinulosa , and the characterization itself matches with the characteristics of the juveniles of all of them. Inductive identification by altitudinal distribution is set aside, because botanical collections were made from the sea-shore near Valparaíso to the snowline up in the Andes ( Gray 1854) and we may suppose that zoologists followed the same roads.