Phylogenetic relationships within a patagonian clade of reptiles (Liolaemidae:Phymaturus) based on DNA sequences and morphology

Abstract

Phymaturus is a clade of lizards that occurs at moderate to high elevations in western Argentina and the adjacent central region of Chile, as well as in various volcanic plateaus of the Patagonian region of Argentina. This genus had previously been divided into two groups: the patagonicus and the palluma groups. In this study, we analyzed relationships within the patagonicus group. The data set was built for 23 species plus nine other terminal taxa of undetermined taxonomic status. In total, 10,631 bp (ND4, Cytb, 12S, COI, five protein coding nuclear genes and seven anonymous nuclear loci) and 254 morphological characters were analyzed in a combined data set for 35 ingroup taxa and nine outgroups. We also ran separate DNA sequence and morphological data sets. We identified four main clades, and revealed congruencies and incongruences with previous studies. The indistinctus clade is recovered as the most basal within the patagonicus group in the strict parsimony analysis, while the somuncurensis clade is the most basal under Bayesian inference. The previously recovered calcogaster clade resulted paraphyletic in both analyses and part of their species are included in a redefined somuncurensis clade. We found low support at basal nodes provoked in part by contradictory evidence shown by rogue taxa. We show the phylogenetic information given by each partition/marker and how they contribute to relationships found in the total evidence analysis. We discuss the phylogenetic position of Phymaturus manuelae, Phymaturus tenebrosus, and Phymaturus patagonicus.

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“…However, our analysis included taxa not included in Esquerré et al (2019). We used Mesquite version 3.31 (Maddison and Maddison 2017), to place the new taxa on Esquerré et al's core tree based on recent phylogenies for Phymaturus (Lobo et al 2016;Lobo et al 2018), and Liolaemus (Abdala 2007;Breitman et al 2011;Abdala et al 2012;Abdala and Juárez Heredia 2013;Portelli and Quinteros 2018;Abdala et al 2020).…”