Romerus (Dubois, Ohler, and Pyron, 2021)

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Rhacophoridae > Subfamily: Rhacophorinae > Genus: Romerus
6 species

Liuixalus Li, Che, Bain, Zhao, and Zhang, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 48: 311. Type species: Philautus romeri Smith, 1953, by original designation. See comment under Romerus in synonymy. 

Romerus Dubois, Ohler, and Pyron, 2021, Megataxa, 5: 262. Type species: Philautus romeri Smith, 1953. Name to replace Liuixalus Li et al., 2008, which Dubois et al. and Dubois, 2021, Bionomina, 24: 41–42, argue was invalidly proposed. 

English Names

None noted. 

Distribution

China in seemingly isolated populations in Hong Kong, Guangdong–Guangxi border area, and Hainan to northern Vietnam. 

Comment

Li, Che, Bain, Zhao, and Zhang, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 48: 302–312, suggested that this taxon is the sister of all rhacophorids, excluding Buergeria, as did Yu, Rao, Yang, and Zhang, 2008, Zool. J. Linn. Soc., 153: 733–749; Yu, Rao, Zhang, and Yang, 2009, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 50: 571–579; and Li, Che, Murphy, Zhao, Zhao, Rao, and Zhang, 2009, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 53: 509–522. Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543–583, confirmed the monophyly of Liuixalus and its placement as the sister taxon of remaining rhacophorines, but by using an antiquated taxonomy they obscured this result. Hertwig, Das, Schweizer, Brown, and Haas, 2012, Zool. Scripta, 41: 29–46, also confirmed the placement of Liuixalus as the sister taxon of remaining rhacophorines and provided a tree of the species. These authors also placed Philautus albopunctatus as a member of Liuixalus, but did not document the change. See comment under Theloderma asperum. Li, Li, Klaus, Rao, Hillis, and Zhang, 2013, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 110: 3441–3446, also confirmed the sister taxon placement of Liuixalus with respect to the remainder of the rhacophorines.  Nguyen, Matsui, and Yoshikawa, 2014, Curr. Herpetol., Kyoto, 33: 29–37, provided some molecular evidence regarding relationships within the genus.  Dubois, 2021, Bionomina, 24: 41–42, discussed generic nomenclature.

Contained taxa (6 sp.):

Romerus calcarius (Milto, Poyarkov, Orlov, and Nguyen, 2013)
Romerus feii (Yang, Rao, and Wang, 2015)
Romerus hainanus (Liu and Wu, 2004)
Romerus ocellatus (Liu and Hu, 1973)
Romerus romeri (Smith, 1953)
Romerus shiwandashan (Li, Mo, Jiang, Xie, and Jiang, 2015)

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