Centrolene Jiménez de la Espada, 1872

Common Names

Giant Glass Frogs (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 46).

Distribution

Humid forests along the Andes from Colombia and Venezuela to Peru, and on the Cordillera de la Costa of Venezuela and the Guiana region.

Comment

For discussion of relationships (as Centrolenella), see Goin, 1964, Herpetologica, 20: 1-8; Savage, 1967, Copeia, 1967: 325-331; Lynch and Duellman, 1973, Occas. Pap. Mus. Nat. Hist. Univ. Kansas, 16: 1-66; and Heyer, 1978, Pap. Avulsos Zool., São Paulo, 32: 15-33. Flores and McDiarmid, 1989, Herpetologica, 45: 401-411, defined the Centrolenella mariae group and formulated an hypothesis of relationship within the group. Heyer, 1985, Pap. Avulsos Zool., São Paulo, 36: 1-21, discussed the species of southeastern Brazil and adjacent Argentina. Ruiz-Carranza and Lynch, 1991, Lozania, 58: 1-26, discussed the Colombian members of Centrolene. Savage, 2002, Amph. Rept. Costa Rica: 358, retained Centrolenella for big-eyed (i.e., plesiomorphically small-bodied) species and restricted Centrolene to the small-eyed (i.e., big bodied) species. Duellman and Señaris, 2003, Herpetologica, 59: 251, diagnosed the Centrolene gorzulae group. 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: 126, and Guayasamin, Bustamante, Almeida-Reinoso, and Funk, 2006, Zool. J. Linn. Soc., 147: 489-513, suggested that Centrolene (as then conceived) is nonmonophyletic, but could not resolve the structure of this nonmonophyly. Guayasamin et al. (2006) also could not confirm the monophyly of the Centrolene prosoblepon group. Cisneros-Heredia and McDiarmid, 2006, Zootaxa, 1244: 1-32, discussed the evidence for the monophyly of Centrolene and recognized three species group: Centrolene geckoideum group; Centrolene prosoblepon group (including the former Centrolene peristictum group); and Centrolene gorzulae group. Guayasamin, Castroviejo-Fisher, Ayarzagüena, Trueb, and Vilà, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 48: 574-595, reported on the phylogenetics of the group and demonstrated that Centrolene is polyphyletic, with at least 6 origins within the Centroleninae tree. Guayasamin, Castroviejo-Fisher, Trueb, Ayarzagüena, Rada, and Vilà, 2009, Zootaxa, 2100: 1-97, remedied this polyphyly, by recognizing several new genera, and redelimiting the genus to the sister taxon of Nymphargus. Amador, Parada, D’Elía, and Guayasamin: 1–20, provided molecular evidence of phylogeny within the genus as part of an elucidation of the Centrolene buckley complex. Ron, García, Brito-Zapata, Reyes-Puig, Figueroa-Coronel, and Cisneros-Heredia, 2024, Zoosyst. Evol., 100: 923–939, provided a densely taxon- and locus-sampled molecular tree for the species in the genus, recognizing three major clades. 

Contained taxa (31 sp.):

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