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Rana fisheri Stejneger, 1893
Las Vegas Valley Leopard Frog Subgenus: Pantherana | family: Ranidae genus: Rana |
| Species Description: Stejneger, L. 1893. Annotated list of the reptiles and batrachians collected by the Death Valley Expedition in 1891, with descriptions of new species. North American Fauna 7: 159–228. | |
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Taxonomic Notes: This species long was thought to be extinct, and if it is restricted to its type locality in the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, that is correct. In 2011 Hekkala, Saumure, Jaeger, Herrmann, Sredl, Bradford, Drabeck and Blum, in an open access article published in Conservation Genetics (DOI 10.1007/s10592-011-0229-6), showed that the closely related species Rana chiricahuensis includes two genetically distinct lineages. They were successful in obtaining sufficient genetic information from specimens of R. fisheri preserved in 1913 in ethanol and stored at the California Academy of Sciences to determine that it is a member of one of the two lineages, which is extant along the Mogollon Rim and White Mtns of central and eastern Arizona and extreme west-central New Mexico. The authors assigned this lineage to Rana fisheri, and accordingly, the species continues to exist. This species was placed in the genus Lithobates by Frost et al. (2006). However, Yuan et al. (2016, Systematic Biology, doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syw055) showed that this action created problems of paraphyly in other genera. Yuan et al. (2016) recognized subgenera within Rana for the major traditional species groups, with Lithobates used as the subgenus for the Rana palmipes group. AmphibiaWeb recommends the optional use of these subgenera to refer to these major species groups, with names written as Rana (Aquarana) catesbeiana, for example. |
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 © 2013 Tara Sprankle (1 of 2) |
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