Morphological and molecular characterization of (Näsmark, 1937) collected from wild Bovidae in South Africa.

Paramphistomes, commonly known as rumen flukes, are digenean parasites that infect ruminants. Accurate morphological identification of paramphistome species is challenging and often neglected. For instance, it requires sagittal midline sections of adult flukes, which are difficult to prepare. Therefore, the majority of the genetic information on paramphistomes found in the International Nucleotide Sequence Database is not supported by morphological descriptions, and the DNA barcodes of paramphistome species remain unreliable. In the present study, both morphological and molecular characterizations were simultaneously performed to ensure the reliability of the DNA information for the paramphistome species (Näsmark, 1937). The morphological characteristics of the sagittal and horizontal sections of adult flukes from a black wildebeest () and a waterbuck () in South Africa were identical to those previously described for Additionally, this study represents a new host record of the species from . All sequences of the internal transcribed spacer 2 region of ribosomal DNA were 100% identical among the 18 flukes analyzed in the present study. A single nucleotide mutation was observed between in this study and detected in domestic ruminants in Kenya.