Systematics and biogeography of the Neotropical genus Mabuya, with special emphasis on the Amazonian skink Mabuya nigropunctata (Reptilia, Scincidae) A. Miralles a,b , S. Carranza c, * a Département d’Ecologie et de Gestion de la Biodiversité, FRE 2696 – Adaptation et évolution des systèmes ostéomusculaires, 55 rue Buffon, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 75005 Paris, France b Laboratoire Populations, Génétique & Evolution, UPR 9034, CNRS, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France c Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta 39-47, 08003 Barcelona, Spain article info Article history: Received 3 May 2009 Revised 24 September 2009 Accepted 9 October 2009 Available online 27 October 2009 Keywords: Phylogeny Biogeography Mabuya Diversification Amazonia Orinoco DNA contamination abstract Phylogenetic analyses using up to 1532 base pairs (bp) of mitochondrial DNA from 106 specimens of Neo- tropical Mabuya, including 18 of the 19 recognized South American and Mesoamerican species, indicate that most species of the genus are monophyletic, including M. nigropunctata that had previously been reported to be paraphyletic. The present results shows that this species includes three highly divergent and largely allopatric lineages restricted to occidental, meridional, and oriental Amazonia. Our dataset demonstrates that previous claims regarding the paraphyletic status of M. nigropunctata and the phylo- genetic relationships within this species complex based on the analysis of three mitochondrial and four nuclear genes (approx. 5000 bp) were erroneous and resulted from two contaminated cytochrome b sequences. The phylogenetic results indicate that diversification in the Neotropical genus Mabuya started approx- imately in the Middle Miocene (15.5–13.4 Ma). The divergence dates estimated for the Mabuya nigro- punctata species complex suggest that the major cladogenetic events that produced the three main groups (occidental (oriental + meridional)) occurred during the Late Miocene. These estimations show that diversification within the M. nigropunctata species complex was not triggered by the climatic changes that occurred during the Pleistocene, as has been suggested by several authors. Rather, our data support the hypothesis that the late tertiary (essentially Miocene epoch) was a period that played a very important role in the generation of biological diversity in the Amazonian forests. Speciation between Mabuya carvalhoi, endemic to the coastal mountain range of Venezuela, and M. croizati, restricted to the Guiana Shield, occurred during the Middle Miocene and may have been as the result of a vicariant event produced by the formation of the present day Orinoco river drainage basin and the consequent appearance of the Llanos del Orinoco, which acted as a barrier to dispersal between these two species. The split between M. bistriata and M. altamazonica and between the occidental and (meridional + oriental) clades of M. nigropunctata fits very well with the biogeographic split between the eastern and western Amazon basins reported for several other taxa. Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The genus Mabuya was one of the largest genera of the family Scincidae, and the only skink genus with a circumtropical distribu- tion (Greer and Broadley, 2000; Greer and Nussbaum, 2000), until it was divided into four units, according to a molecular phyloge- netic analysis using partial sequences of the mitochondrial 12S and 16S rRNA genes and the geographic distribution of each unit (Mausfeld et al., 2002). These authors placed the species of the Cape Verde archipelago in the genus Chioninia, the Asian species in the genus Eutropis, the African and Malagasy species in Euprepis (subsequently Trachylepis; see Bauer, 2003), and all the South American, Central American, and Caribbean species, except Trachylepis atlantica, which is endemic to Fernando de Noronha, Brazil and the enigmatic Trachylepis tschudii, described from the Peruvian Amazonia (see Miralles et al., 2009a), in the nominal genus Mabuya. Such a taxonomic splitting is nevertheless contro- versial, Jesus et al. (2005) and Whiting et al. (2006) considering that the division of Mabuya into four genera is premature, since a fifth and still unnamed distinct genetic lineage can be identified. Although the taxonomy of the supergroup Mabuya sensu lato is still not totally resolved (see Carranza and Arnold, 2003; Jesus et al., 2005; Whiting et al., 2006; Mausfeld and Schmitz, 2003), the Neotropical genus Mabuya, which is the only representative 1055-7903/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2009.10.016 * Corresponding author. Fax: +34 932309555. E-mail addresses: miralles.skink@gmail.com (A. Miralles), salvador.carranza@ ibe.upf-csic.es (S. Carranza). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 54 (2010) 857–869 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ympev