Plestiodon parvulus Taylor

Castiglia, Riccardo, Annesi, Flavia, Bezerra, Alexandra M. R., García, Andrés & Flores-Villela, Oscar, 2010, Cytotaxonomy and DNA taxonomy of lizards (Squamata, Sauria) from a tropical dry forest in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve on the coast of Jalisco, Mexico, Zootaxa 2508, pp. 1-29 : 18-19

publication ID

https://doi.org/ 10.5281/zenodo.196005

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6495192

persistent identifier

https://treatment.plazi.org/id/03E2993F-FFF2-F45C-FF48-F90B7FBAFDDB

treatment provided by

Plazi

scientific name

Plestiodon parvulus Taylor
status

 

Plestiodon parvulus Taylor (Southern pigmy skink)

Specimens analysed: two males (CEAC23, CEAC24)

Distribution: Mexican endemic. The species occurs along Pacific coast from Sinaloa to Colima.

Subspecies: no subspecies have been described.

Karyotype: the karyotype is here described for the first time in this species. The karyotype shows 2n = 26, with 12 macro- and 14 microchromosomes ( Fig. 10 View FIGURE 10 ). All the macro-chromosomes are biarmed as are four pairs of the microchromosomes. The other microchromosomes are telocentric. This karyotype differs in the morphology of the microchromosomes from other karyotypes of Plestiodon species. For example, the microchromosomes seem all biarmed in P. inexpectatus and P. obsoletus ( Caputo et al. 1994) .

DNA taxonomy: neither gene sequence of P. parvulus is present in GenBank. Therefore, the fragment of the 16S rRNA sequenced for this study was aligned with available sequences of other congeners ( Schmitz et al. 2004) to assess the phylogenetic affinities and genetic distance of this species within the genus. The obtained tree is shown in Figure 11 View FIGURE 11 . The results suggest that E. parvulus is the sister species of another Mexican endemic species, P. l y n x e (bootstrap values 71% with NJ and 58% with ML). The genetic distance between the two species is 4.5–5.0% and is among the lowest interspecific genetic distance of the analysed dataset. This is the first report of a relationship between these two species ( Griffith et al. 2000; Schmitz et al. 2004).

Kingdom

Animalia

Phylum

Chordata

Class

Reptilia

Order

Squamata

Family

Scincidae

Genus

Plestiodon

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