Sclerophrys funerea ( Bocage, 1866 )

Santos, Bruna S., Marques, Mariana P., Bauer, Aaron M. & Ceríaco, Luis M. P., 2021, Herpetological results of Francisco Newton’s Zoological Expedition to Angola (1903 – 1906): a taxonomic revision and new records of a forgotten collection, Zootaxa 5028 (1), pp. 1-80 : 9

Sclerophrys funerea ( Bocage, 1866)

Material (one specimen): One juvenile specimen (MHNCUP/ ANF 161 , formerly UP-MHNFCP-094970; Fig. S2 ), collected from Cabiri [-8.92125º, 13.66654º, 31 m a.s.l.] Bengo Province, in 1903 .

Comments: Sclerophrys funerea is a species known from west-central Africa, from Gabon to Uganda and south to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola ( Marques et al. 2018). Ferreira (1904, 1906) cited several Bufo funereus , with and without locality information data. Specimen MHNCUP/ANF 161 was labeled as B. regularis . After reexamining the extant specimens previously identified as B. funereus by Ferreira, we found that most of them to correspond to either S. regularis (Reuss, 1833) or S. pusilla (Mertens, 1937) (see accounts below). The author mistakenly identified S. funerea as S. regularis most likely due to the difficult and confusing characters used to differentiate S. funerea from all remaining Sclerophrys . This difficulty is still latent, as noted by Channing & Rödel (2019), who commented that S. funerea are characterized by the absence of a tarsal fold that is replaced by a row of spiny tubercles.

Figures

FIGURE 2. Map of collecting localities based on the Newton Expedition. Dotted white circles: collecting localities from the herpetological specimens; red circles: remaining georeferenced collecting localities.