Central Washington University ScholarWorks@CWU All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences College of the Sciences 6-10-2015 Osteological Variation among Extreme Morphological Forms in the Mexican Salamander Genus Chiropterotriton (Amphibia: Plethodontidae): Morphological Evolution And Homoplasy David M. Darda David B. Wake Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/cotsfac Part of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons RESEARCH ARTICLE Osteological Variation among Extreme Morphological Forms in the Mexican Salamander Genus Chiropterotriton (Amphibia: Plethodontidae): Morphological Evolution And Homoplasy David M. Darda1*, David B. Wake2 1 Department of Biological Sciences, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, United States of America, 2 Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America *
[email protected] Abstract Osteological variation is recorded among and within four of the most distinctive species of the Mexican salamander genus Chiropterotriton. Analysis of the data is consistent with the OPEN ACCESS monophyletic status of the genus and documents previously unrecorded intraspecific and Citation: Darda DM, Wake DB (2015) Osteological interspecific variation. Most of the recorded variation involves qualitative and quantitative Variation among Extreme Morphological Forms in the proportional differences, but four fixed differences constitute autapomorphic states that af- Mexican Salamander Genus Chiropterotriton firm and diagnose some species (C. dimidiatus, C. magnipes). Osteological variation in 15 (Amphibia: Plethodontidae): Morphological Evolution characters is analyzed with respect to predictions generated from four hypotheses: 1) phy- And Homoplasy. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127248. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127248 logeny, 2) adaptation to specific habitats (the four species include cave-dwelling, terrestrial, and arboreal forms), 3) size-free shape, and 4) size.