Cynops Tschudi, 1838

Class: Amphibia > Order: Caudata > Family: Salamandridae > Subfamily: Pleurodelinae > Genus: Cynops

Cynops Tschudi, 1838, Classif. Batr.: 94. Type species: Salamandra subcristatus Temminck and Schlegel, 1838 (= Molge pyrrhogaster H. Boie, 1826), by monotypy.

Hypselotriton Wolterstorff, 1934, Zool. Anz., 108: 257. Type species: Molge wolterstorffi Boulenger, 1905, by original designation. Synonymy by Zhao and Hu, 1984, Stud. Chinese Tailed Amph.: 21.

English Names

Firebelly Newts (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 35).

Distribution

Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, and Ryukyu Is., Japan; China (southern Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangxi, southern Hubei, Henan, Hunan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces)..

Comment

Japanese species discussed (as Triturus) by Sato, 1943, Monogr. Tailed Batr. Japan: 358-388, and Hayashi and Matsui, 1988, Zool. Sci., Tokyo, 5: 1121-1136. See also Freytag, 1962, Mitt. Zool. Mus. Berlin, 38: 451-459. Zhao and Hu, 1984, Stud. Chinese Tailed Amph.: 21-22, and Zhao, Hu, Jiang, and Yang, 1988, Studies on Chinese Salamanders: 18-19 (English translation), recognized three species groups: Cynops pyrrhogaster group (Cynops pyrrhogaster and Cynops ensicauda), Cynops orientalis group (Cynops orientalis), and Cynops wolterstorffi group (Cynops wolterstorffi and Cynops cyanurus), of which the latter two are now assigned to Hypselotriton. Chan, Zamudio, and Wake, 2001, Copeia, 2001: 997-1009, presented evidence that Cynops (in the sense of including Hypselotriton) is paraphyletic with respect to Pachytriton and Paramesotriton, with Cynops pyrrhogaster closest to these taxa. Thorn and Raffaëlli, 2000, Salamand. Ancien Monde: 305-323, provided accounts. Weisrock, Papenfuss, Macey, Litvinchuk, Polymeni, Ugurtas, Zhao, Jowkar, and Larson, 2006, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 41: 855-857, found Cynops in a monophyletic group with Pachytriton and Paramesotriton. Steinfartz, Vicario, Arntzen, and Caccone, 2007, J. Exp. Zool., 308B: 139-142, suggested that Cynops is paraphyletic with respect to Paramesotriton and Pachytriton. Hypselotriton was removed from the synonymy of Cynops by Dubois and Raffaëlli, 2009, Alytes, 26: 31-32, 45 (who revised the group), where it had been placed by Zhao and Hu, 1984, Stud. Chinese Tailed Amph.: 21, although the synonymy was not accepted by Ye, Fei, and Hu, 1993, Rare and Economic Amph. China 104; without discussion. Scholz, 1995, Acta Biol. Benrodis, 7: 25-75, treated Hypselotriton as a subgenus of Cynops. Fei, Ye, Huang, Jiang, and Xie, 2005, Illust. Key Chinese Amph.: 47-48, provided a key to Chinese species (as Cynops). See comment under Pachytriton. On the basis of 1.2kb of mtDNA Wu, Wang, Jiang, and Hanken, 2010, Zootaxa, 2346: 42-52, did not resolve a monophyletic Cynops (sensu Dubois and Raffaëlli, 2009, Alytes, 26: 1-85; the Japanese species of Cynops, sensu lato) with respect to Hypselotriton (the Chinese species of Cynops, sensu lato) and on that basis chose to retain Hypselotriton as a synonym of Cynops. Nevertheless, studies based on larger amounts of similar sequence data and only marginally lower taxon sampling (e.g., Zhang, Papenfuss, Wake, Qu, and Wake, 2008, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 49: 586-597) or substantially different molecular data sets (e.g., Weisrock, Papenfuss, Macey, Litvinchuk, Polymeni, Ugurtas, Zhao, Jowkar, and Larson, 2006, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 41: 855-857) did find a monophyletic Cynops (sensu sricto), this confirmed by Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543-583, who constructed a tree of legacy DNA sequences that is consistent with the monophyly of Cynops (sensu stricto) and Hypselotriton as well as them being sister taxa and therefore consistent with either a one-genus or two-genus arrangement. Because considering Hypselotriton to be part of Cynops by workers naming new species, I (DRF) have followed the one-genus arrangement.

Contained taxa

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