Effects of climatic change on speciation of palearctic brown frogs

Abstract:

Climatic changes since the Pliocene have allowed repeated events of allopatric speciation that resulted in present day species communities of the Northern hemisphere. With 20 species, Rana (water frogs and brown frogs) is the most specious genus among Western Palearctic amphibians and represents an ideal taxon for testing vicariance hypotheses. In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that recent climatic oscillations were responsible for radiation of Western Palearctic brown frogs. They performed phylogenetic analyses of all species of brown frogs using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequence data. Neighbor joining, maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian analysis were used as methods of phylogenetic inference. A molecular clock was calibrated and used to date speciation events. All phylogenetic analyses resulted in the same topology consisting in a basal radiation into five …

Año de publicación:

2003

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