Schismaderma Smith, 1849

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

Schismaderma Smith, 1849, Illust. Zool. S. Afr., 3 (Part 28, Errata sheet): 1 p. and Smith, 1849, Illust. Zool. S. Afr., 3 (Appendix): 28. Type species: Schismaderma lateralis Smith, 1849 (= Bufo carens Smith, 1848), by monotypy.

English Names

African Split-skin Toads (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 45).

Red Toads (Ananjeva, Borkin, Darevsky, and Orlov, 1988, Dict. Amph. Rept. Five Languages: 44).

Distribution

Tanzania and southeastern Dem. Rep. Congo to northeastern Northern Cape Province (Rep. South Africa).

Comment

Equivalent to the Bufo carens group of Tandy and Keith, 1972, in Blair (ed.), Evol. Genus Bufo: 158. Removed from the synonymy of Bufo by Van Dijk, 1966, Ann. Natal Mus., 18: 248. 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: 129, suggested on the basis of DNA sequence data that Schismaderma is the sister taxon of Peltophryne. Chaparro, Pramuk, and Gluesenkamp, 2007, Herpetologica, 63: 203-212, and Pramuk, Robertson, Sites, and Noonan, 2008, Global Ecol. Biogeograph., 17: 72-83, suggested that Schismaderma is the sister taxon of Duttaphrynus. 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. Van Bocxlaer, Biju, Loader, and Bossuyt, 2009, BMC Evol. Biol., 9 (e131): 1-10, suggested on the basis of molecular data that Schismaderma is the sister taxon of Churamiti + Nectophrynoides. In a subsequent, more densely-sampled analysis, Van Bocxlaer, Loader, Roelants, Biju, Menegon, and Bossuyt, 2010, Science, 327: 679-682, found Schismaderma to be phylogenetically isolated, but still possibly related to Churamiti + Nectophrynoides. Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543-583, in their study of Genbank sequences, came to results similar to that of Van Bocxlaer et al., 2010 (although this is difficult to see because the authors explicitly adopted a non-monophyletic and out-dated taxonomy) with the exception that they found the immediate sister taxon to be Bufotes.

Contained taxa

Schismaderma carens (Smith, 1848)

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