Lygodactylus tuberifer Boettger, 1913

Vences, Miguel, Multzsch, Malte, Gippner, Sven, Crottini, Angelica, Glaw, Frank, Köhler, Jörn, Rakotomanga, Sandratra, Rasamison, Solohery & Raselimanana, Achille P., 2024, Taxonomizing a truly morphologically cryptic complex of dwarf geckos from Madagascar: molecular evidence for new species-level lineages within the Lygodactylus tolampyae complex, Zootaxa 5468 (3), pp. 416-448 : 429

Identity of Lygodactylus tuberifer Boettger, 1913

Lygodactylus tuberifer is currently considered a junior synonym of L. tolampyae (e.g., Uetz et al. 2023), and therefore it might be an earlier available name for a species-level lineage in the L. tolampyae complex. This nomen has a convoluted history. It was coined by Boettger (1913) based on three explicitly listed specimens: one adult female from “Menabé, W. Mad.” and two adult females from “Tsimanampetso, SW. Mad.”, with the numbers “(coll. Senckenberg No. 4160,4 b)”, but in the original description, there is also a mention of one or several male specimens that would bear 5 or 7 femoral pores. Mertens (1922), in his type catalogue of the collections of the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, listed the specimen SMF 4160,4a from Menabé as type of the species (without any mention of other syntypes however), thus implicitly designating this specimen as lectotype. Pasteur (1965) criticized this choice because the lectotype specimen was the only one in the heterogeneous type series that did not correspond to the species that previously had been considered as L. tuberifer but instead was L. tolampyae . Mertens (1965) responded to this criticism by providing a rationale for the choice of the lectotype (which had been renumbered as SMF 8948) and also clarified that the specimen was a male, not a female, as suggested by Boettger (1913). Mertens (1965) then proceeded to describe L. tuberosus to provide a name for the species to which the paralectotypes of L. tuberifer from Tsimanampetsotsa belong. Therefore, SMF 5949 is concurrently a paralectotype of L. tuberifer and the holotype of L. tuberosus Mertens, 1965 ; and SMF 8950‒8952 are concurrently paralectotypes of L. tuberifer and paratypes of L. tuberosus .

The origin of the L. tuberifer holotype from the Menabé region in the West suggests that it probably belongs to the same evolutionary lineage as the holotype of L. tolampyae (thus, mitochondrial lineage A+B). This hypothesis is further supported by the scale counts of the specimen: with longitudinal counts of 225 dorsal and 103 ventral scales, it fits the comparatively lower values for dorsals and higher values for ventrals that we observed in individuals of lineage A+B from the Tsingy de Bemaraha, a locality not far from Menabé.