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| Author(s): |
Guilherme José da Costa Silva
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Botucatu. 2015-03-03. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Instituto de Biociências. Botucatu |
| Defense date: | 2013-02-28 |
| Advisor: | Claudio Oliveira; Mônica Sônia Rodriguez |
| Abstract | |
Rineloricaria currently comprises 65 valid species, which are widespread in the Neotropical Region. Because these species occupy a great variety of habitats, they present a wide intra and interspecific morphological diversity, which difficult the understanding of the taxonomical and a specially the evolutionary process of these species and of their morphological characters. In this sense, this study sought to investigate the evolution of Rineloricaria genus, under taxonomical, ecomorphological and biogeographical aspects, based on molecular phylogenetic analyses. Results show that this genus is a monophyletic group, which originated about 15 million years ago in the region of the paleo-Amazonas-Orinoco drainage system, and that the evolution of the neotropical drainage systems reflected directly in the current distribution of Rineloricaria species. On the other hand, specific environmental factors guided the evolution of some characters in a convergent way, some of them previously used in the description of phenetic groups, which in turn showed to be artificial. This study contributes to the understanding of the evolutionary processes of Rineloricaria species, and also proposes alternative routes of dispersion and colonization of neotropical fishes (AU) | |