Hemiphractidae Peters, 1862

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Hemiphractidae
121 species

Hemiphractidae Peters, 1862, Monatsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. Berlin, 1862: 146. Type genus: Hemiphractus Wagler, 1828.

HemiphractinaMivart, 1869, Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1869: 294.

Amphignathodontidae Boulenger, 1882, Cat. Batr. Sal. Coll. Brit. Mus., Ed. 2: 449. Type genus: Amphignathodon Boulenger, 1882. Synonymy with Hemiphractidae by Noble, 1931, Biol. Amph.: 508–509; and Guayasamin, Castroviejo-Fisher, Ayarzagüena, Trueb, and Vilà, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 48: 577.

AmphignathodontinaeGadow, 1901, Amphibia and Reptiles: 139; Laurent, 1986, in Grassé and Delsol (eds.), Traite de Zool., 14: 716.

HemiphractinaeGadow, 1901, Amphibia and Reptiles: 139, 210; Laurent, 1986, in Grassé and Delsol (eds.), Traite de Zool., 14: 719.

Hemignathodontinae Miranda-Ribeiro, 1926, Arq. Mus. Nac., Rio de Janeiro, 27: 106. Type genus: Not designated, but including Coelonotus Miranda-Ribeiro, Fritzia Miranda-Ribeiro, Gastrotheca Fitzinger, Opisthodelphis Günther. Unavailable family-group name for reason of not being formulated on a generic name.

HemiphractidaeMiranda-Ribeiro, 1926, Arq. Mus. Nac., Rio de Janeiro, 27: 18.

Gastrothecinae Noble, 1927, Ann. New York Acad. Sci., 30: 93. Type genus: Gastrotheca Fitzinger, 1843. Synonymy with Hemiphractidae by Noble, 1931, Biol. Amph.: 508–509.

Opisthodelphyinae Lutz, 1968, Pearce-Sellards Ser., 11: 13. Type genus: Opisthodelphys Günther, 1859 "1858". Synonymy with Amphignathodontinae by implication of Duellman, 1970, Monogr. Mus. Nat. Hist. Univ. Kansas: 18.

Cryptobatrachidae 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: 201. Type genus: Cryptobatrachus Ruthven, 1916. Synonymy by Guayasamin, Castroviejo-Fisher, Ayarzagüena, Trueb, and Vilà, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 48: 577.

Cryptobatrachinae — Castroviejo-Fisher, Padial, De la Riva, Pombal, Silva, Rojas-Runjaic, Medina-Méndez, and Frost, 2015, Zootaxa, 4004: 20. 

Stefaniinae Dubois, Ohler, and Pyron, 2021, Megataxa, 5: 153. Type genus: Stefania Rivero, 1968. Subfamily. 

English Names

None noted.

Distribution

Tropical and Andean South America; Costa Rica, Panama; Trinidad and Tobago.

Comment

Duellman, 1970, Monogr. Mus. Nat. Hist. Univ. Kansas: 18, included eight genera. Subsequent workers, i.e., Duellman and Trueb, 1976, Occas. Pap. Mus. Nat. Hist. Univ. Kansas, 58: 12, and Maxson, 1977, Syst. Zool., 26: 72, transferred two of these genera, Anotheca and Nyctimantis, into Hylinae. Duellman and Gray, 1983, Herpetologica, 39: 333–358, provided a cladogram of the genera, as did Duellman and Hoogmoed, 1984, Misc. Publ. Mus. Nat. Hist. Univ. Kansas, 75: 33. Duellman, Maxson, and Jesiolowski, 1988, Copeia, 1988: 527–543, discussed the immunological evidence for evolution of hemiphractines. Laurent, 1984, Acta Zool. Lilloana, 38: 19–28, provided a phenetic study of the subfamily (as Amphignathodontinae) and demonstrated the possibility of generic rearrangements. Mendelson, Silva, and Maglia, 2000, Zool. J. Linn. Soc., 128: 125–148, provided a cladogram based on morphology that suggested that Gastrotheca is paraphyletic with respect to Hemiphractus, although this was based on the prior assumption of the monophyly of the group, which was the received wisdom at the time. Darst and Cannatella, 2004, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 31: 462–475, suggested on the basis of molecular evidence that Hemiphractinae (sensu lato) is polyphyletic and not closely related to hylids. Faivovich, Haddad, Garcia, Frost, Campbell, and Wheeler, 2005, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 294: 1–370, obtained similar results and transferred "Hemiphractinae" out of Hylidae and into "Leptodactylidae" (sensu lato, a former grade of hyloid frogs, not Leptodactylidae, sensu stricto) to render a monophyletic Hylidae. Wiens, Fetzner, Parkinson, and Reeder, 2005, Syst. Biol., 54: 719–748, also considered the hemiphractines (sensu lato) to not be hylids, but recognized them as a family, Hemiphractidae, strongly supported in their Bayesian analysis and weakly supported by their parsimony analysis. Wiens, Graham, Moen, Smith, and Reeder, 2006, Am. Nat., 168: 579–596 (suppl. inform.), with additional evidence, subsequently found "Hemiphractinae" to be nonmonophyletic in their parsimony analysis but did not provide a Bayesian or maximum-likelihood analysis of those data. 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, concluded on the basis of somewhat different lines of evidence that "Hemiphractinae" as previously considered is composed of three phylogenetically distantly-related taxa which they recognized as families: Amphignathodontidae (Flectonotus and Gastrotheca), Cryptobatrachidae (Cryptobatrachus and Stefania), and Hemiphractidae (Hemiphractus). Wiens, Kuczynski, Duellman, and Reeder, 2007, Evolution, 61: 1886–1899, confirmed the results of Wiens et al. (2005). Guayasamin, Castroviejo-Fisher, Ayarzagüena, Trueb, and Vilà, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 48: 577,  considered Hemiphractidae (sensu lato) to form a monophyletic group on the basis of a maximum-likelihood tree. See comment under Hylidae. Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543–583, confirmed the monophyly of this taxon, although continuing their exclusion of Cryptobatrachus from analysis. Blackburn and Wake, 2011, In Zhang (ed.), Zootaxa, 3148: 39–55, discussed briefly the taxonomic history of the group. Vitt and Caldwell, 2014, Herpetology, 4th Ed., provided a summary of life history, diagnosis, and taxonomy. Blackburn and Duellman, 2013, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 68 : 709–714, provided a molecular phylogeny of the group, also excluding Cryptobatrachus. Duellman, 2015, Marsupial Frogs, provided a review of the family, including life history,taxonomy, as well as his personal view of the history of its systematics, and  a key to the genera and species and accounts for all species. Subsequently, Castroviejo-Fisher, Padial, De la Riva, Pombal, Silva, Rojas-Runjaic, Medina-Méndez, and Frost, 2015, Zootaxa, 4004: 1–75, provided a phylogenetic analysis, that superseded the analysis of Duellman (2015), based on molecular and morphological evidence of representatives of all nominal general and provided a subfamilial taxonomy and analysis of life-history evolution. Streicher, Miller, Guerrero, Correa-Quezada, Ortiz, Crawford, Pie, and Wiens, 2018, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 119: 128–143, suggested on the basis of a molecular analysis of hyloid frogs that Hemiphractidae is part of a monophyletic group, along with Ceratophryidae and Hylidae (sensu lato), within a group they named Amazorana. Echevarría, De la Riva, Venegas, Rojas-Runjaic, Dias, and Castroviejo-Fisher, 2021, Cladistics, 37: 375–401, reported on the interaction of alignment protocol (tree- and similarity-alignment), tree-building protocol (parsimony and ML), and differing character-state assignments (fifth character state, unknown nucleotide, and presence/absence characters) as well as the effect of inclusion of phenotypic characters; the results extend well beyond what can be discussed in a taxonomic catalogue, but the bottom line is that the current blithe assumption that alignment method is trivial compared to tree-building method is clearly falsified. The bottom line of this study was that the only stable relationships that were shared across all assumption sets were the monophyly of the family and genera, requiring the rejection of subfamilies. 

Contained taxa (121 sp.):

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