DNA taxonomy reveals two new species records of Hyalinobatrachium (Anura: Centrolenidae) for Bolivia

Abstract

We collected two specimens of the genus Hyalinobatrachium during fieldwork expeditions to the Departamento Pando—the northernmost region of Bolivia situated in the south-western Amazonian basin, within the zone of tall evergreen lowland rainforest. The specimens are deposited in the Colección Boliviana de Fauna, La Paz (CBF 6453) and in the National Museum, Prague (NMP6V 74059). Because species identification within Hyalinobatrachium based only on morphological characters is in many cases problematic (Kok & Castroviejo-Fisher 2008; Castroviejo-Fisher et al. 2009), we took advantage of published sequences of Hyalinobatrachium to identify our samples. Our results show that each specimen belongs to a different species (H. mondolfii and H. munozorum), none of them previously known to occur in Bolivia. The taxonomic implications of our discovery are briefly discussed.