Epicrionops Boulenger, 1883

Class: Amphibia > Order: Gymnophiona > Family: Rhinatrematidae > Genus: Epicrionops
7 species

Epicrionops Boulenger, 1883, Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., Ser. 5, 11: 202. Type species: Epicrionops bicolor Boulenger, 1883, by monotypy. See comment.

English Names

Beaked Caecilians (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 25).

Distribution

Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Guyana, and presumably into adjacent Venezuela; possibly into northern Bolivia.

Comment

Lynch, 2000 "1999", Rev. Acad. Colomb. Cienc. Exact. Fis. Nat., 23: 332, noted an undescribed species of Epicrionops from Lago de Calima, Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Wilkinson and Nussbaum, 2006, In Exbrayat (ed.), Reprod. Biol. Phylog. Gymnophiona: 39–78 [53], diagnosed Epicrionops and suggested that evidence of monophyly of Epicrionops with respect to Rhinatrema is currently unknown. Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543-583 (see comment in Amphibia record) suggested on the basis of molecular evidence that Epicrionops niger is more closely related to Rhinatrema bivittatum than to Epicrionops marmoratus, suggesting that a generic rearrangement is warranted. This result was confirmed by San Mauro, Gower, Müller, Loader, Zardoya, Nussbaum, and Wilkinson, 2014, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 73: 177–189. Dubois, Ohler, and Pyron, 2021, Megataxa, 5: 407, treated Epicrionops as a junior synonym of Rhinatrema on the basis of their molecular analysis where their one exemplar of Epicrionops was found to be the sister taxon, with weak statistical confidence, of their exemplars of Rhinatrema. See comment under Rhinatrema

Contained taxa (7 sp.):

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