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Employees of the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, with the assistance of foreign colleagues, described a new species of tailed amphibians - the crocodile newt Tylototriton thaiorum. Previously, finds of this species were mistaken for the North Vietnamese crocodile newt T. Vietnamensis or Laotian T. notialis.

Until recently, 31 species of crocodile newts (genus Tylototriton) were known to science. They all live in the humid mountain forests of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Most of these species are endemic, that is, they are found in a limited area, without going beyond its limits.

The newly described species Tylototriton thaiorum was previously mistaken for T. Vietnamensis or T. notialis: the former lives in the north of Vietnam, and the latter, a little further south, in the eastern part of Central Laos. The finds that were made between these two regions were attributed to one of the already known species.

However, herpetologists from Moscow State University under the leadership of Nikolai Poyarkov, associate professor of the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, analyzing all finds of crocodile newts from their own collections brought from expeditions, and museum collections found that individual specimens collected in locations between the typical ranges of T. Vietnamensis and T. Notialis differ in some characteristics from both known species. In particular, they do not have the orange specks in the folds of skin on the throat, characteristic of the nearest neighbor T. notialis, the fingers are shorter and less expressively colored. So scientists have a suspicion that they are dealing not with two, but with three species, one of which has not yet been described.

Molecular genetic data confirmed the scientists' guesses: Tylototriton thaiorum differed in the ND2 and 16S rRNA mtDNA genes from T. Notialis by 3%, and even more from T. Vietnamensis. This degree of difference is sufficient to qualify the specimen as a new species. Based on the model now stored in the collection of the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University, the new species was described by all modern standards. Phylogenetic analysis showed that Tylototriton thaiorum and T. notialis, apparently, are sister species, and therefore differ insignificantly from each other. They probably descended from a single common ancestor, whose descendants were isolated from each other by the river Ka.

“The name of the new species of newts -“ thaiorum ”- we decided to give in honor of the Thai tribe, a relative of the Thai national minority inhabiting northern Vietnam. It was on the territory of this people that our research took place in the province of Nghe An, and it was quite difficult to organize an expedition to these wild places. Thais helped our team with setting up the camp, helped prepare food, and finally, it was the hunters of this tribe who showed me the puddles in which they met newts, and as a result, we managed to collect several specimens of the new species, ”said Nikolay Poyarkov.

To date, finds of the newly described crocodile newt T. Thaiorum are known only from the mountain forests of the Puhoat Reserve, where they are found at altitudes from 700 to 1000 m above sea level. The authors of the publication propose to classify this species as endangered and include it in the Red Book of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The first description of the new species was published in the journal Taprobanica. The research was carried out with the grant support of the Russian Science Foundation.

Photo of the newly described newt Tylototriton thaiorum in its natural habitat © Nikolay A. Poyarkov

Source: msu.ru, sci-dig.ru