Afroedura namaquensis, Jacobsen, Niels H. G., Kuhn, Arianna L., Jackman, Todd R. & Bauer, Aaron M., 2014

Jacobsen, Niels H. G., Kuhn, Arianna L., Jackman, Todd R. & Bauer, Aaron M., 2014, A phylogenetic analysis of the southern African gecko genus Afroedura Loveridge (Squamata: Gekkonidae), with the description of nine new species from Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa, Zootaxa 3846 (4), pp. 451-501 : 470

A. namaquensis stat. nov. ( FitzSimons, 1938)

Distribution. Known from scattered localities in the Succulent Karoo Biome in the Little Namaqualand region of the Northern Cape Province ( Bauer 2014a) ( Fig. 4 ).

Remarks. Haacke (1965), in describing A. africana tirasensis considered A. namaquensis as a subspecies of A. africana , and it has maintained this rank since ( Mertens 1971; Branch 1981, 1988, 1998; Onderstall 1984; Bauer 2014a), although chiefly because this poorly known taxon has not been reviewed subsequently. Under modern species concepts, the differences between the supposed subspecies of A. africana— including precloacal pore counts, presence of internasal granules, gular scale counts, and color pattern ( Haacke 1965) would generally be accepted as evidence of specific distinctness, especially in light of the large disjunctions between the forms and their likely low vagility ( Mouton & Mostert 1985; Jacobsen 1997). On this basis we here recognize this taxon at the rank of full species.

Figures

FIGURE 4. Map of southern Africa showing the approximate distributional ranges of previously described species of Afroedura. Red dots represent localities sampled for the genetic portion of the study. Ranges based on Branch (1998) and Bates et al. (2014) as well as unpublished data. Taxon names follow the conclusions of this paper. Area demarcated by a dashed line is presented in more detail in Figure 6.