Lithobates kauffeldi (Feinberg, Newman, Watkins-Colwell, Schlesinger, Zarate, Curry, Shaffer, and Burger, 2014)

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Ranidae > Genus: Lithobates > Species: Lithobates kauffeldi

Rana kauffeldi Feinberg, Newman, Watkins-Colwell, Schlesinger, Zarate, Curry, Shaffer, and Burger, 2014, PLoS One, 9 (10: e108213): 4. Holotype: YPM 13217, by original designation. Type locality: "Bloomfield region, Richmond County (Staten Island), N[ew] Y[ork], United States". urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:149ED690-FA7D-4216-A6A1-AA48CC39B292.

Lithobates kauffeldiFrost, 2014, Amph. Spec. World, vers. 6.0 (of 31 Oct.). To bring the taxonomy into alignment with that employed by this online catalogue. 

Rana (Pantherana) kauffeldi — Yuan, Zhou, Chen, Poyarkov, Chen, Jang-Liaw, Chou, Matzke, Iizuka, Min, Kuzmin, Zhang, Cannatella, Hillis, and Che, 2016, Syst. Biol., 65: 835.

English Names

Atlantic Coast Leopard Frog (original publication). 

Mid-Atlantic Coast Leopard Frog (Frost, Lemmon, McDiarmid, and Mendelson, 2017, in Crother (ed.), Herpetol. Circ., 43: 15). 

Distribution

Central Connecticut and southern New York (where apparently extirpated from Long Island) through New Jersey (presumably adjacent extreme southeastern Pennsylvania) and south along the coastal plain through Delaware, eastern and southwestern Maryland, and tidewater Virginia to North Carolina, USA. 

Comment

In the Lithobates pipiens complex, most closely related to Lithobates palustris on the basis of mtDNA evidence according to Newman, Feinberg, Rissler, Burger, and Shaffer, 2012, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 63: 445–455, the first discoverers of the unnamed species, although morphologically most similar to Lithobates sphenocephala and Lithobates pipiensAltig and McDiarmid, 2015, Handb. Larval Amph. US and Canada: 234–235, provided an account of larval morphology and biology (as Lithobates sp.). Schlesinger, Feinberg, Kleopfer, Beane, Bunnell, Burger, Corey, Jaycox, Kiviat, Kubel, Quinn, Raithel, Scott, Wenner, White, Zarate, and Shaffer, 2018, PLoS One, 13(11: e0205805): 1–28, refined the range of the species and it morphological identification. 

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