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Delimiting species boundaries is a complex challenge usually hindered by overlooked morphological diversification or misinterpretation of geographically structured phenotypic variability. Independent molecular data are extremely useful to characterize and understand such morphological diversity. Morphological and molecular variability of the non-phoretic and apterous, widely distributed, giant blister beetles of the genus Berberomeloe, were investigated within and between lineages across most of the distributional range of the genus. We used two mtDNA gene fragments to characterize genetic variability and to produce a time-calibrated phylogeny of the genus. Our results reveal several mitochondrial lineages, allopatrically, parapatrically and sympatrically distributed. Most clades are not distinguishable between each other based on morphometrics. However, no morphometric overlap is observed between two closely related clades, one of them occurring in sympatry with a distantly congeneric species (B. insignis), suggesting that sympatry could trigger morphological diversification. Although most species share a morphometric space, they can be morphologically identified by a combination of easily observed characteristic qualitative features. Based on the concordance between mtDNA clades and morphological units, we describe six new species of Berberomeloe (B. castuo sp. nov., B. comunero sp. nov., B. indalo sp. nov, B. yebli sp. nov., B. payoyosp. nov. and B. tenebrosus sp. nov.), revalidate two taxa (B. maculifrons comb. nov. and B. laevigatus comb. nov.) and redefine B. majalis., The visits of MGP to the Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum of Budapest (HU-TAF) and to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle of Paris (FR-TAF) were supported by the European Union SYNTHESYS Project (http://www.synthesys.info/) ‘European Community Research Infrastructure Action’ within package FP7 ‘Capacities’. This work has been funded by the Spanish Government project-grant CGL2015-66571-P (Ministerio de Economía y Empresa-Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional) to MGP. The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Author(s): Rovito, SM; Parra-Olea, G; Recuero, E; Wake, DB | Abstract: The Neotropical bolitoglossine salamanders represent an impressive adaptive radiation, comprising roughly 40% of global salamander species diversity. Despite decades of morphological studies and molecular work, a robust multilocus phylogenetic hypothesis based on DNA sequence data is lacking for the group. We estimated species trees based on multilocus nuclear and mitochondrial data for all major lineages within the bolitoglossines, and used our new phylogenetic hypothesis to test traditional biogeographical scenarios and hypotheses of morphological evolution in the group. In contrast to previous phylogenies, our results place all Central American endemic genera in a single clade and suggest that Central America played a critical role in the early biogeographical history of the group. The large, predominantly Mexican genus Pseudoeurycea is paraphyletic, and analyses of the nuclear data place two lineages of Pseudoeurycea as the sister group of Bolitoglossa. Our phylogeny reveals extensive homoplasy in morphological characters, which may be the result of truncation or alteration of a shared developmental trajectory. We used our phylogenetic results to revise the taxonomy of the genus Pseudoeurycea.