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| Author(s): |
Sergio Marques de Souza
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Biociências (IBIOC/SB) |
| Defense date: | 2017-01-16 |
| Examining board members: |
Miguel Trefaut Urbano Rodrigues;
Carlos Henrique Grohmann de Carvalho;
Felipe Gobbi Grazziotin;
Lucia Garcez Lohmann;
Cristina Yumi Miyaki
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| Advisor: | Miguel Trefaut Urbano Rodrigues; Katia Cristina Machado Pellegrino |
| Abstract | |
The Amazon rainforest houses a significant portion of the world biodiversity, however, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the processes involved in its generation and maintenance, with several hypotheses proposed so far. Loxopholis lizards (Squamata: Gymnophthalmidae) are small-sized; show low vagility, and high fidelity to the humid forest environment, making them ideal to test hypotheses on the history of landscape modifications in Northern South America, during the Neogene. In this thesis, we revise the morphological variation, the taxonomy, and the geographic distribution of Loxopholis species, as well as estimated a phylogenetic hypothesis and divergence times for these species based on sequences from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. With this dataset, we build a model for the evolutionary history of Loxopholis and compared the results with geologic reconstructions of the Amazon available in the literature, which provided independent time estimates for geological events that potentially affected the evolutionary history of genus. In this study, we also showed that the actual diversity described for Loxopholis was severely underestimated. We found that L. osvaldoi represents a complex of cryptic species with 8-14 potential new species, and strong divergences in both the mitochondrial and the nuclear genomes, virtually doubling the actual diversity in the genus. Finally, we describe the first bisexual population for the parthenogenetic species L. percarinatum, discussing its implications to the origin of parthenogenesis in the genus (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 12/10163-1 - Phylogeny and systematics of the lizards genus Leposoma gr. parietale (Squamata: Gymnophthalmidae), based on morphological and molecular characters |
| Grantee: | Sérgio Marques de Souza |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |