Afroedura nivaria

Jacobsen, Niels H. G., Kuhn, Arianna L., Jackman, Todd R. & Bauer, Aaron M., 2014, A phylogenetic analysis of the southern African gecko genus Afroedura Loveridge (Squamata: Gekkonidae), with the description of nine new species from Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa, Zootaxa 3846 (4), pp. 451-501 : 471

A. nivaria ( Boulenger, 1895 [1894])

Distribution. Drakensberg of the Eastern Cape and Free State provinces, South Africa. Its occurrence in Lesotho is suspected but not yet documented (Bates & Bauer 2014b) ( Fig. 4 ).

Remarks. Loveridge (1947) synonymized A. amatolica with A. nivaria and this interpretation was long followed (e.g, Wermuth 1965; De Waal 1978; Branch 1981). The two are not sister taxa ( Fig. 1 ) and A. amatolica was raised from synonymy by Visser (1984b). Afroedura nivaria as currently construed is non-monophyletic ( Makhubo et al. 2011; Makhubo 2013) and is currently under revision ( Bates & Branch 1998).

Figures

FIGURE 1. Maximum likelihood phylogram of Afroedura relationships derived from two genes (ND 2, RAG 1). Support values are presented as maximum likelihood bootstraps (MLBS) / Bayesian posterior probabilities (BPP) / parsimony bootstraps (PBS). Only most closely related outgroup taxa are shown. Images (top to bottom) of representative Afroedura species groups: A. hawequensis, A. pondolia, A. karroica, A. loveridgei, A. haackei, A. marleyi, A. granitica sp. nov.

FIGURE 4. Map of southern Africa showing the approximate distributional ranges of previously described species of Afroedura. Red dots represent localities sampled for the genetic portion of the study. Ranges based on Branch (1998) and Bates et al. (2014) as well as unpublished data. Taxon names follow the conclusions of this paper. Area demarcated by a dashed line is presented in more detail in Figure 6.