A new species of Gonyosoma Wagler, 1828 (Serpentes, Colubridae), previously confused with G. prasinum (Blyth, 1854)

By

Liu, Shuo
Hou, Mian
Lwin, Ye Htet
Wang, Qiaoyan
Rao, Dingqi

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2021-6-22

Original Publication

Evolutionary systematics

Volume

5

Series / Issue

Issue: 1

Pages

129--139

Subjects

Htamanthi , Morphology , Phylogeny , systematics , taxonomy , Yunnan

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Hamburg Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak) 2017-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.5.66574

 

Abstract

A new species of the genus Gonyosoma Wagler is described from Yunnan Province, China. The new species closely resembles G. prasinum (Blyth), but it is differentiated from the latter species by the following characters: precloacal plate divided, iris blue and inside of mouth greyish-white in life. Based on phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial cytochrome b sequence data, the new species is recovered as the sister species to G. prasinum by Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood analyses. The uncorrected pairwise distance between the new species and other species of the genus Gonyosoma ranged from 11.78% to 17.07% calculated using the mitochondrial cytochrome b sequence. This discovery increases the number of Gonyosoma species to seven.