Biodiversity Institute and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-7561, USA.
Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2012 Jun;63(3):915-21. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2012.02.019. Epub 2012 Mar 7.
Some of Southeast Asia's most poorly known vertebrates include forest lizards that are rarely seen by field biologists. Arguably the most enigmatic of forest lizards from the Indo Australian archipelago are the Flap-legged geckos and the Flying geckos of the genera Luperosaurus and Ptychozoon. As new species have accumulated, several have been noted for their bizarre combination of morphological characteristics, seemingly intermediate between these genera and the pan-Asian gecko genus Gekko. We used the first multilocus phylogeny for these taxa to estimate their relationships, with particular attention to the phylogenetic placement of the morphologically intermediate taxa Ptychozoon rhacophorus, Luperosaurus iskandari, and L. gulat. Surprisingly, our results demonstrate that Luperosaurus is more closely related to Lepidodactylus and Pseudogekko than it is to Gekko but that some species currently classified as Luperosaurus are nested within Gekko. The Flying Gecko genus Ptychozoon is also nested within Gekko, suggesting that higher-level taxonomic revision of the generic boundaries within Southeast Asian gekkonines will be a priority for the immediate future.
一些东南亚最鲜为人知的脊椎动物包括很少被野外生物学家看到的森林蜥蜴。或许，来自印度-澳大利亚群岛的最神秘的森林蜥蜴是褶翅蜥属和飞蜥属的蜥蜴，如卢珀龙属和翼蜥属。随着新物种的积累，人们注意到其中一些物种具有奇异的形态特征组合，它们似乎介于这两个属和亚洲泛生的壁虎属壁虎之间。我们使用这些分类群的第一个多基因系统发育来估计它们的关系，特别关注形态中间分类群翼蜥属 Rhacophorus、卢珀龙属 Iskandari 和 L. gulat 的系统发育位置。令人惊讶的是，我们的结果表明，卢珀龙与 Lepidodactylus 和 Pseudogekko 的关系比与壁虎属更密切，但目前被归类为卢珀龙的一些物种却嵌套在壁虎属内。飞蜥属翼蜥也嵌套在壁虎属内，这表明在不久的将来，对东南亚壁虎类的属间分类群边界进行更高层次的分类修订将是当务之急。
