Amietophrynus Frost, Grant, Faivovich, Bain, Haas, Haddad, de Sá, Channing, Wilkinson, Donnellan, Raxworthy, Campbell, Blotto, Moler, Drewes, Nussbaum, Lynch, Green, and Wheeler, 2006

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Bufonidae > Genus: Amietophrynus

Amietophrynus Frost, Grant, Faivovich, Bain, Haas, Haddad, de Sá, Channing, Wilkinson, Donnellan, Raxworthy, Campbell, Blotto, Moler, Drewes, Nussbaum, Lynch, Green, and Wheeler, 2006, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 297: 221. Type species: Bufo regularis Reuss, 1833, by original designation.

English Names

None noted.

Distribution

Subsaharan Africa; north of the Sahara in Western Saharan and Morocco, northern Algeria and Tunisia.

Comment

Frost, Grant, Faivovich, Bain, Haas, Haddad, de Sá, Channing, Wilkinson, Donnellan, Raxworthy, Campbell, Blotto, Moler, Drewes, Nussbaum, Lynch, Green, and Wheeler, 2006, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 297: 221, recognized Amietophrynus for the former 20-chromosome "Bufo" (as well as the 22-chromosome "Bufo" pardalis group, which is phylogenetically imbedded within this clade); see Cunningham and Cherry, 2004, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 32: 671-685. See comment under Bufonidae for access to additional relevant literature. Smith and Chiszar, 2006, Herpetol. Conserv. Biol., 1: 6-8, implied that this taxon should be considered a subgenus of Bufo; see comment under Bufonidae. Chaparro, Pramuk, and Gluesenkamp, 2007, Herpetologica, 63: 203-212, suggested that Amietophrynus is imbedded within a group of Asian and African genera (including Schismaderma, Duttaphrynus, and Ingerophrynus). Van Bocxlaer, Biju, Loader, and Bossuyt, 2009, BMC Evol. Biol., 9 (e131): 1-10, and Van Bocxlaer, Loader, Roelants, Biju, Menegon, and Bossuyt, 2010, Science, 327: 679-682, suggested that Amietophrynus is the sister taxon Mertensophryne. Mercurio, 2011, Amph. Malawi: 110-126, provided accounts and an identification key for the species of Malawi. Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543-583, in their study of Genbank sequences, confirmed the monophyly of this taxon (although this is obscured by their explicit adoption of an out-dated and non-monophyletic taxonomy), its placement as the sister taxon of Capensibufo and provided a phylogenetic tree for their exemplar species.

Contained taxa

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