Lithobates kauffeldi (Feinberg, Newman, Watkins-Colwell, Schlesinger, Zarate, Curry, Shaffer, and Burger, 2014)

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Ranidae > Genus: Lithobates > Species: Lithobates kauffeldi

Rana kauffeldi Feinberg, Newman, Watkins-Colwell, Schlesinger, Zarate, Curry, Shaffer, and Burger, 2014, PLoS One, 9 (10: e108213): 4. Holotype: YPM 13217, by original designation. Type locality: "Bloomfield region, Richmond County (Staten Island), N[ew] Y[ork], United States". Zoobank publication registration: 2E7F07A6-19B1-4352-B5B7-A227A93A37CD

Lithobates kauffeldiFrost, 2014, Amph. Spec. World, vers. 6.0 (of 31 Oct.). To bring the taxonomy into alignment with that employed by this online catalogue. 

Rana (Pantherana) kauffeldi — Yuan, Zhou, Chen, Poyarkov, Chen, Jang-Liaw, Chou, Matzke, Iizuka, Min, Kuzmin, Zhang, Cannatella, Hillis, and Che, 2016, Syst. Biol., 65: 835.

English Names

Atlantic Coast Leopard Frog (original publication). 

Mid-Atlantic Coast Leopard Frog (Frost, Lemmon, McDiarmid, and Mendelson, 2017, in Crother (ed.), Herpetol. Circ., 43: 15). 

Distribution

Central Connecticut and southern New York (where apparently extirpated from Long Island) through New Jersey (presumably adjacent extreme southeastern Pennsylvania) and south along the coastal plain through Delaware, eastern and southwestern Maryland, and tidewater Virginia to North Carolina, USA. 

Geographic Occurrence

Natural Resident: United States of America, United States of America - Delaware, United States of America - Maryland, United States of America - New Jersey, United States of America - New York, United States of America - North Carolina, United States of America - Pennsylvania, United States of America - Virginia

Endemic: United States of America

Comment

In the Lithobates pipiens complex, most closely related to Lithobates palustris on the basis of mtDNA evidence according to Newman, Feinberg, Rissler, Burger, and Shaffer, 2012, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 63: 445–455, the first discoverers of the unnamed species, although morphologically most similar to Lithobates sphenocephala and Lithobates pipiensAltig and McDiarmid, 2015, Handb. Larval Amph. US and Canada: 234–235, provided an account of larval morphology and biology (as Lithobates sp.). Schlesinger, Feinberg, Kleopfer, Beane, Bunnell, Burger, Corey, Jaycox, Kiviat, Kubel, Quinn, Raithel, Scott, Wenner, White, Zarate, and Shaffer, 2018, PLoS One, 13(11: e0205805): 1–28, refined the range of the species and it morphological identification. 

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