Megophrys shuichengensis

Ohler, Annemarie, Frétey, Thierry & Dubois, Alain, 2015, The authorships and dates of the specific nomina Megophrys shuichengensis and Pseudohynobius shuichengensis (Amphibia), Zootaxa 3963 (4), pp. 595-597 : 596

Megophrys shuichengensis

The nomen of this species has been credited to Tian, Gu & Sun (2000) by all recent authors who mentioned it ( Dubois et al. 2005: 30; Fei et al. 2008: 403, 2012: 236; Frost 2014). In fact, its situation is similar to that described above.

A first description of Megophrys shuichengensis was published by Tian Yungzhou & Sun Aiqun (1995) in the JLTC. In the first page of this paper, the Chinese idiogram for ‘Sun’ is transliterated into ‘Sen’ but it is transliterated into ‘Sun’ in all other publications. The description mentioned an adult female holotype LTHC 944001 (snout-vent length 113.86 mm) collected at an elevation of 1850 metres in Shuicheng County (the village name, Fenghuan Village, mentioned in the ‘redescription’ was not given) on 30 April 1994, an adult male ‘allotype’ LTHC 945004 (snout-vent length 113.78 mm) and 43 other paratypes (6 males, 3 females and 34 tadpoles) collected in 1994 and 1995 at elevations from 1800 to 1870 metres in the same county. The nomen is clearly available as the paper provided descriptions, measurements, skeletal characters and comparisons with Megophrys giganticus Liu, Hu & Yang, 1960 .

A ‘redescription’ of the same species under the same nomen was published by Tian, Gu & Sun (2000) in Acta Zootaxonomica Sinica, without mention of the original publication. The nomen was based on the same holotype (snoutvent length given there as 109.0 mm), the same ‘allotype’ (snout-vent length given there as 116.0 mm) and 57 paratypes (7 males, 6 females, 34 tadpoles and 10 ‘larvae’) collected from 1994 to 1997. As paratypes are not ‘name-bearing type’ specimens (onomatophores) the fact that there were more paratypes in the 2000 ‘redescription’ has no nomenclatural consequences.

Although the original description of this species has been overlooked until now by all authors, the nomen Megophrys shuichengensis Tian & Sun, 1995 is available and valid, and the nomen Megophrys shuichengensis Tian, Gu & Sun, 2000 is its invalid junior homonym and objective synonym (isonym).

Frost (2014) stated that this species was transferred to the genus Xenophrys by Ohler (2003), but this nomen was not cited in this paper. Although they maintained the species in the genus Megophrys, Fei et al. (2008: 403) mentioned in its synonymic list the new combination and incorrect spelling Xenophrys shuichengoensis , making it enter published taxonomic literature although it had only appeared in the unpublished website of Frost (2004), now unavailable online. The combination Xenophrys shuichengensis was made by Delorme et al. (2006).

The phylogenetic relationships within the Megophryini are not sufficiently known and problems about the taxonomic identity of many species, in particular type species, remain. Most authors agree that maintaining all species of this group in a single genus Megophrys is not satisfying, but the genus Xenophrys as currently understood by the authors seems to be polyphyletic and needs further splitting. This whole group is in need of revision and in the meanwhile we provisionally follow Mahony et al. (2013) who recognized a single genus Megophrys . Therefore, the species at stake here should now be cited as Megophrys shuichengensis Tian & Sun, 1995 .