Cnemaspis goaensis Sharma 1976
Creators: name: Khandekar, Akshay
name: Thackeray, Tejas
name: Agarwal, Ishan
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Animalia
Chordata
Reptilia
Squamata
Gekkonidae
Cnemaspis
Cnemaspis goaensis

description: Cnemaspis goaensis Sharma 1976
(Table 1 & 2)
Cnemaspis indraneildasii Bauer, 2002
Holotype. ZSI 22110 (adult male), 27.5 mm SVL; “ ca. 3 km South of Forest Rest House, Canacona (Poinguinim), Goa ” (south-western India).
Paratypes. ZSI 22213–22215 (adult males), ZSI 22216 (adult female) same locality data as holotype.
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Referred material. NRC-AA-1124 (VG 403), NRC-AA-1125 (VG 404), ZSI/WGRC-3150 (VG 405), adult males, NRC-AA-1127 (VG 406), Adult female, from Botanical garden of Smt. Kasturbai Walchand College, Sangli, (16.862° N, 74.577° E; ca. 550 m asl.), Sangli district, Maharashtra state, India, collected by Akshay Khandekar and Ninad Gosavi on 24 March 2018. ZSI/WGRC-3151 (AK 359), adult male, ZSI/WGRC-3152 (AK 358), ZSI/WGRC- 3153 (AK 361), adult females, on a laterite wall of a wine shop located between Canacona and Poinguinim, (14.991° N, 74.099° E; ca. 90 m asl.), South Goa District, Goa state, India, collected by Akshay Khandekar, Abhilash Kadam, Nilesh Natavade, Ninad Gosavi and Omkar Kinkar on 17 July 2018. BNHS 2801 (VG 380), BNHS 2802 (VG 385), adult males, BNHS 2804 (VG 382), BNHS 2803 (VG 387), adult females, from near Gund, (15.088° N, 74.541° E; ca. 440 m asl.), NRC-AA-1126 (VG 388), adult male, from near Ganeshgudi bus stop, (15.282° N, 74.529° E; ca. 430 m asl.), Uttara Kanada District, Karnataka state, India, collected by Akshay Khandekar, Nikhil Gaitonde, Ninad Gosavi and Swapnil Pawar on 15 March 2018.
Redescription of the holotype. See Manamendra-Arachchi et al. (2007).
Diagnosis. A small-sized Cnemaspis, snout to vent length less than 34 mm. Dorsal pholidosis heterogeneous; weakly keeled, granular scales in the vertebral and paravertebral region with a few scattered, enlarged, keeled tubercles, intermixed with about three or four irregularly arranged rows of large, keeled tubercles on each side of flank, tubercles in lowest row largest and spine-like, 6–8 rows of dorsal tubercles at mid-body; ventral scales on belly smooth, imbricate, scales on gular and pectoral region smooth or weakly carinate, 27–32 scales across belly, 111–126 longitudinal scales from mental to cloaca; subdigital scansors smooth, entire, unnotched, 10–12 lamellae under digit I of manus and pes, 14–17 lamellae under digit IV of manus and 17–21 lamellae under digit IV of pes; males with three or four femoral pores on each thigh separated on either side by 8–12 poreless scales from a continuous series of two or three precloacal pores; tail with enlarged, strongly keeled, distinctly pointed, conical tubercles forming whorls; a median row of sub-caudal scales slightly enlarged, smooth only at anterior half of the tail, rest strongly keeled.
Notes on the status of C. indraneildasii. Cnemaspis indraneildasii was originally described by Bauer (2000) based on a single sub-adult female specimen housed at Zoologisches Museum Hamburg (ZMH) that was collected from Gund, Karnataka during the German-Indian expedition of 1955–1958. No further data was published on the species and it remained poorly known for nearly two decades until recently, Sayyed et al. (2018) described four new Cnemaspis from NWG based on morphology and presented a16S mitochondrial phylogeny with 18 of the then 35 described Indian Cnemaspis including topotypic C. goaensis and C. indraneildasii. The genetic divergence between these two species were strikingly low which suggested C. indraneildasii could be a junior synonym of C. goaensis. Subsequently, Khandekar et al. (2019b) described two more new Cnemaspis of the C. girii clade from Maharashtra and provided major diagnostic morphological characters and ND2 phylogeny for all other described Cnemaspis from NWG. In their work, they treated C. indraneildasii as a junior synonym of C. goaensis based on the low genetic divergence between topotypical specimens of both species (1.6 % uncorrected pairwise ND2 sequence divergence) but did not provide detailed morphological data to support the synonymy. However, the detailed morphological dataset based on topotypic specimens of C. goaensis & C. indraneildasii as well as specimens from additional localities provided in this work (see Table 3 & 4) suggests that these two species are morphologically indistinguishable from one another, and C. indraneildasii is a junior synonym of the relatively widely distributed species C. goaensis.
description: Published as part of Khandekar, Akshay, Thackeray, Tejas & Agarwal, Ishan, 2021, A novel small-bodied rupicolous Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the northern Western Ghats, Maharashtra, India, with comments on the status of C. indraneildasii, Bauer 2000, pp. 331-350 in Zootaxa 4969 (2) on pages 332-336, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4969.2.6, http://zenodo.org/record/4749112