Plestiodon Duméril and Bibron

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

Plestiodon Duméril and Bibron

The genus Eumeces has been recently split into four genera, namely Pariocela, Eumeces , Eurylepis , and Mesoscincus ( Schmitz et al. 2004) . Because of priority reasons, the name Plestiodon has been adopted instead of Pariocela for those American species formerly referred to as Eumeces , except for those placed in Mesoscincus ( Smith 2005) . The differences among the groups were based in part on analyses of chromosomes numbers. A large number of studies showed that all species of the American Plestiodon have 2n = 26 chromosomes ( Deweese & Wright 1970; Wu 1983; Capriglione 1987; Guo & Dong, 1988; Kato et al. 1998), while all the African species of the genus Eumeces are unique in having a constant 2n = 32 chromosomes ( Gorman 1973; Kupriyanova 1973; De Smet 1981; Kupriyanova 1986; Eremchenko et al. 1992; Caputo et al. 1993, 1994; Hassan 1996). The Eurylepis taeniolatus group can be also differentiated from other groups by uniquely having 2n = 28 chromosomes ( Ivanov & Bogdanov 1975; Kupriyanova 1986; Eremchenko et al. 1992).

Molecular phylogenetic analysis by Schmitz et al. (2004), which included American species, identified four species groups in Plestiodon : a group comprised of P. anthracinus , P. egregius and, surprisingly, Neoseps reynoldsi ; a “ laticeps ” species-group including laticeps, inexpectatus , fasciatus, obsoletus , septentrionalis and obstusirostris; a “ skiltonianus ” species-group with skiltonianus, gilberti and rubricaudatus; a clade composed of the two Mexican species P. brevirostris and P. l y n x e.

Following the recent systematic revision of the genus, Plestiodon “ sensu stricto ” contains 41 species. Ten species have been karyotyped and all showed 2n = 26 (12 macro- and 14 microchromosomes) ( Caputo et al. 1994). The karyotypes differ in the morphology of microchromosomes, however, this can be partly due to the interpretation of smaller chromosomes by different authors.