In an effort to study the systematic affinities and specieslevel
phylogenetic relationships of the enigmatic anurans
variably assigned to the genera
Ingerana
or
Limnonectes
(family
Dicroglossidae
), we collected new
molecular sequence data for five species including four
Himalayan taxa,
Limnonectes xizangensis,
Lim. medogensis
,
Lim. alpina,
Ingerana borealis and one southeast Asian species,
I. tasanae
, and analyzed these
together with data from previous studies involving other
ostensibly related taxa. Our surprising results
demonstrate unequivocally that
Lim. xizangensis,
Lim.
medogensis and
Lim. alpina form a strongly supported
clade, the sister-group of the family Australasian forest
frog family Ceratobatrachidae. This discovery requires
an expansion of the definition of Ceratobatrachidae and
represents the first record of this family in China. These
three species are distinguished from the species of
Ingerana and
Limnonectes by the: (1) absence of
interdigital webbing of the foot, (2) absence of terminal
discs on fingers and toes, (3) absence of circumarginal
grooves on the fingers and toes, and (4) absence of
tarsal folds. Given their phylogenetic and morphological
distinctiveness, we assign them to the oldest available
generic name for this clade,
Liurana Dubois 1987, and
transfer
Liurana from Dicroglossidae to the family
Ceratobatrachidae. In contrast,
Ingerana tasanae was
found to be clustered with strong support with the
recently described genus
Alcalus
(Ceratobatrachidae), a small clade of otherwise Sundaic species; this
constitutes a new record of the family Ceratobatrachidae
for Myanmar and Thailand. Finally,
Ingerana borealis
clustered with the “true”
Ingerana (family Dicroglossidae),
for which the type species is
I. tenasserimensis
.
