Acronym: TWOSS
Collaborators: Carl Vangestel (JEMU-RBINS), Gontran Sonet (JEMU-RBINS), Massimiliano Virgilio (JEMU-RMCA), Arnaud Henrard (RMCA), Rudy Jocqué (RMCA), Daniele Polotow (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Biologia, Museu de Zoologia, Brazil), Nikolaj Scharff (Natural History Museum of Denmark, Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen), Peter Jäger (Senckenberg Research Institute, Germany)
Year: 2018
Summary: The generic systematics of Ctenidae (currently 514 species in 47 genera) is still in its infancy, especially for the Afrotropical taxa. Mainly, the genus Ctenus Walckenaer, 1805 is problematic because it is one of the old genera to which a high number of species have been attributed on the basis of vague resemblance alone. Hundreds of species, mainly from Africa and South America (but also from Asia and even New Guinea), were described in the genus. Although some new Afrotropical genera were recently created to accommodate misplaced species (Henrard & Jocqué 2017), most of the species are still attributed to ‘Ctenus’, a polyphyletic group (Sim¬ó & Brescovit, 2001; Polotow & Brescovit, 2014) that appears not to be an African genus (Brescovit & Sim¬ó, 2007). In this study, the phylogeny of the Ctenidae will be inferred using mitochondrial genomes on a set of Ctenus-like genera (mainly African), in order to get a higher resolution of the backbone phylogeny of Henrard & Jocqué (2017) and which could be informative for genus-level classifications.