Historical museum collections clarify the evolutionary history of cryptic species radiation in the world's largest amphibians.

ABSTRACT: Inaccurate taxonomic assessment of threatened populations can hinder conservation prioritization and management, with human-mediated population movements obscuring biogeographic patterns and confounding reconstructions of evolutionary history. Giant salamanders were formerly distributed widely across China, and are interpreted as a single species, Andrias davidianus. Previous phylogenetic studies have identified distinct Chinese giant salamander lineages but were unable to associate these consistently with different landscapes, probably because population structure has been modified by human-mediated translocations for recent commercial farming. We investigated the evolutionary history and relationships of allopatric Chinese giant salamander populations with Next-Generation Sequenci

SUBMITTER: Turvey ST 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6787787 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature