Osteocephalus buckleyi, Boulenger, 1882

Ortiz, Diego A., Hoskin, Conrad J., Werneck, Fernanda P., Réjaud, AleXandre, Manzi, Sophie, Ron, Santiago R. & Fouquet, Antoine, 2023, Historical biogeography highlights the role of Miocene landscape changes on the diversification of a clade of Amazonian tree frogs, Organisms Diversity & Evolution (New York, N. Y.) 23 (2), pp. 395-414 : 405-406

Osteocephalus buckleyi group

The majority rule consensus delimited 13 OTUs within the Osteocephalus buckleyi group ( Fig. 1a). Ten of them unambiguously correspond to described species, with sequences from their type locality or nearby sites, and/or from their known distribution: Osteocephalus buckleyi Boulenger, 1882 ( Fig. 3c in the Appendix); O. cabrerai Cochran & Goin, 1970 ( Fig. 4a in the Appendix); O. camufatus Jungfer et al., 2016 (holotype); O. cannatellai Ron et al., 2012 ; O. carri Cochran & Goin, 1970 ; O. festae Peracca, 1904 ; O. helenae Ruthven, 1919 ( Fig. 4b–d in the Appendix); O. mutabor Jungfer & Hödl, 2002 ( Fig. 3e–f in the Appendix); O. verruciger Werner, 1901 ; and O. vilmae Ron et al., 2012 ( Fig. 3d in the Appendix). The remaining three OTUs ( O. aff. cabrerai , O. aff. helenae 1 and O. aff. verruciger ) are discussed below.

Osteocephalus vilmae was synonymised under O. buckleyi by Jungfer et al. (2013). However, we associate the OTU containing three ‘ O. buckleyi ’ samples to the name O. vilmae in this study because these samples cluster with high support with other O. vilmae specimens (including the holotype) in previous phylogenies that include both mitochondrial (mtDNA) and nuclear (nDNA) data; and this clade is sister to O. buckleyi sensu stricto with high support ( Chasiluisa et al., 2020; Jungfer et al., 2013). Further justification for the validity of O. vilmae is presented in Ortiz and Ron (2018).

The single sequence of O. aff. cabrerai (from Iça River, Amazonas, Brazil) is sister and geographically close to O. cabrerai sensu stricto ( Fig. 1a; Electronic Supplement 3). The long branches separating them suggest that each represents a distinct species but morphological and bioacoustics data remain to be examined.

The single sequence of O. aff. helenae 1 is from Mataracú, Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It corresponds to the southernmost record of the O. buckleyi group (Electronic Supplement 3). Osteocephalus aff. helenae 1 is sister to O. helenae + O. aff. helenae 2 ( Fig. 1a; see comments below on ‘ O. helenae ’ species complex).

The sequences of O. aff. verruciger are from the Caquetá Department, Colombia, lying geographically close to the type locality of a recently described species, previously considered part of O. verruciger (i.e. O. omega Duellman, 2019 ). Therefore, we tentatively labelled this OTU as O. cf. omega ( Fig. 1a). However, is still necessary to determine whether they are conspecific.

Finally, a terminal for O. sangay Chasiluisa et al., 2020 (holotype) was added to the mitogenomic matrix because this species did not have 16S data and thus was not included in the delimitation analyses. Osteocephalus sangay is genetically and morphologically distinct from its sister species, O. cannatellai ( Chasiluisa et al., 2020) . Osteocephalus duellmani Jungfer, 2011 was absent in our mitogenomic phylogeny and no DNA sequences are known for this species to infer its relationships. It has been tentatively allocated within the O. buckleyi group given its morphological affinities ( Jungfer, 2011). Nevertheless, O. duellmani may be a junior synonym of O. festae Peracca, 1904 ( Ortiz & Ron, 2020).