Contributions to Zoology, 76 (4) 261-278 (2007) The phylogeny of crested newts (Triturus cristatus superspecies): nuclear and mitochondrial genetic characters suggest a hard polytomy, in line with the paleogeography of the centre of origin J.W. Arntzen1, G. Espregueira Themudo1,2, B. Wielstra1,3 1 National Museum of Natural History, P. O. Box 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands,
[email protected] 2 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, Campus Agrário de Vairão, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal,
[email protected] 3 Institute of Biology Leiden, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9516, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands, wielstra@natu- ralis.nl Key words: allozymes, historical biogeography, mitochondrial DNA-sequences, Triturus macedonicus, Triturus marmoratus, vicariance Abstract tionary lineage and we propose to elevate its taxonomic status to that of a species, i.e., from Triturus c. macedonicus (Karaman, Newts of the genus Triturus (Amphibia, Caudata, Salamandri- 1922) to Triturus macedonicus (Karaman, 1922). dae) are distributed across Europe and adjacent Asia. In spite of its prominence as a model system for evolutionary research, the phylogeny of Triturus has remained incompletely solved. Our Contents aim was to rectify this situation, to which we employed nuclear encoded proteins (40 loci) and mitochondrial DNA-sequence Introduction .................................................................................... 261 data (mtDNA, 642 bp of the ND4 gene). We sampled up to four Materials and methods ................................................................. 263 populations per species covering large parts of their ranges. Al- Sampling strategy ................................................................... 263 lozyme and mtDNA data were analyzed separately with parsi- Allozyme data .......................................................................... 263 mony, distance, likelihood and Bayesian methods of phyloge- Mitochondrial DNA-sequence data ...................................