Ecologica Montenegrina 39: 1-6 (2021) This journal is available online at: www.biotaxa.org/em http://dx.doi.org/10.37828/em.2021.39.1 https://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:DDA69FE1-8F86-483D-B824-E2D109A41936 A new genus of ultra-elongate freshwater mussels from Vietnam and eastern China (Bivalvia: Unionidae) IVAN N. BOLOTOV1, ALEXANDER V. KONDAKOV1, EKATERINA S. KONOPLEVA1,* & ILYA V. VIKHREV1 1N. Laverov Federal Center for Integrated Arctic Research of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Arkhangelsk, Russia *Corresponding author. E-mail:
[email protected] Received: 10 December 2020│ Accepted by V. Pešić: 30 December 2020 │ Published online: 4 January 2021. Taxa with an ultra-elongate shell are widespread among marine and freshwater bivalves, being an iconic illustration of convergent evolution, e.g. Solen Linnaeus, 1758 (Solenidae), Mycetopoda d’Orbigny, 1835 (Mycetopodidae), and Lanceolaria Conrad, 1853 (Unionidae) (Anderson 2014). The genus Solenaia Conrad, 1869 (Unionidae: Gonideinae) was considered a compact group of freshwater mussels having an elongate shell and ranging from the Mekong Basin in Thailand through northern Vietnam and eastern China to South Korea (Haas 1969; Graf & Cummings 2007; Zieritz et al. 2018). However, a growing body of modern phylogenetic research revealed that this genus is not monophyletic despite the fact that its members are very similar conchologically (Huang et al. 2019; Pfeiffer et al. 2019, 2020; Lopes-Lima et al. 2020). Indeed, it is one more remarkable example of shell convergence in unionids together with the former genera Trapezoideus Simpson, 1900 sensu lato and Oxynaia Haas, 1911 sensu lato, each of which was found to be an amalgam of several phylogenetically distant but conchologically similar lineages (Konopleva et al.