Pedostibes Günther, 1876

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Bufonidae > Genus: Pedostibes
1 species

Pedostibes Günther, 1876 "1875", Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1875: 576. Type species: Pedostibes tuberculosus Günther, 1876 "1875", by monotypy.

Common Names

Asian Tree Toads (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 45).

Tree Toads (Dinesh, Radhakrishnan, Deepak, and Kulkarni, 2023, Fauna India Checklist, vers. 5.0 : 3).

Distribution

Western Ghats of Maharashtra to southern Kerala and adjacent southwestern Tamil Nadu in isolated montane rainforest localities, 300 to 1800 m elevation.

Comment

Barbour, 1938, Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington, 51: 191–195, supplied synonymies and distributions in the sense of including what is now Rentapia. Graybeal and Cannatella, 1995, Herpetologica, 51: 123, noted that there is no unambiguous morphological evidence in support of the monophyly of this taxon. Frost, Grant, Faivovich, Bain, Haas, Haddad, de Sá, Channing, Wilkinson, Donnellan, Raxworthy, Campbell, Blotto, Moler, Drewes, Nussbaum, Lynch, Green, and Wheeler, 2006, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 297: 129, suggested on the basis of DNA sequence evidence that Pedostibes is most closely related to Phrynoidis. Smith and Chiszar, 2006, Herpetol. Conserv. Biol., 1: 6–8, implied that this taxon should be considered a subgenus of Bufo; see comment under Bufonidae. See comments under Sabahphrynus. Matsui, Yambun Imbun, and Sudin, 2007, Zool. Sci., Tokyo, 24: 1159–1166, corroborated a close relationship between Phrynoidis and Pedostibes. Van Bocxlaer, Biju, Loader, and Bossuyt, 2009, BMC Evol. Biol., 9 (e131): 1–10, noted that Pedostibes is polyphyletic, with their exemplar Pedostibes hosii being closely related to Duttaphrynus, but that Pedostibes tuberculosus is most closely related to a clade composed of Duttaphrynus and Adenomus. These authors suggested that the name Pedostibes will go with the group within which their exemplar Pedostibes tuberculosus falls (see below for resolution). Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543–583, found Pedostibes tuberculosus (the name-bearer of Pedostibes) to be the sister taxon of a group composed of Schismaderma, Bufotes, Churamiti, Nectophrynoides, "Bufo" brongersmai, Xanthophryne, and Duttaphrynus. Another group of nominal Pedostibes (including their exemplars Pedostibes rugosus and Pedostibes hosii) was placed as the sister taxon of Phrynoidis. These authors made no taxonomic remedy for the phylogenetic problem. Ron, Mueses-Cisneros, Gutiérrez-Cárdenas, Rojas-Rivera, Lynch, Rocha, and Galarza, 2015, Zootaxa, 3947: 363, on the basis of 16s mtDNA analysis also concluded that Pedostibes is polyphyletic, suggesting that Pedostibes hosii and Pedostibes rugosus are more closely related to Phrynoidis and Pedostibes tuberculosus closer to Duttaphrynus + Xanthophryne, and suggested that the former two species could be transferred to Phrynoidis but declined to make the formal change. Subsequently, Chan, Grismer, Zachariah, Brown, and Abraham, 2016, PLoS One, 11(1: e0145903): 1–13, partitioned Pedostibes, restricting Pedostibes sensu stricto to India and referring the Sunda species to Rentapia.

Contained taxa (1 sp.):

Pedostibes tuberculosus Günther, 1876

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