^ A / /I / , ^ MUS. COMP. ZOOL. ^ " NA -LaiA/rei^ce-library OCCASIONAL PAPERS APR 1 5 1977 HARVARD of the UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas NUMBER 64, PAGES 1-46 APRIL 1, 1977 PHYLOGENY OF PLEURODEMA (ANURA: LEPTO-DACTYLIDAE ) : A BIOGEOGRAPHIC MODEL By William E. Duellman^ and Alberto Veloso M.^ Modern biogeographic thinking is undergoing drastic modifi-cations with the reassessment of Croizat's ( 1964 ) conceptual con-tributions by Brundin (1966), Croizat, Nelson, and Rosen (1974), Ball (1975), and Rosen (1975). Recent studies on frogs within the Neotropical Realm ( Duellman, 1972; Duellman and Crump, 1974; Heyer, 1973) have provided additional support for the importance of climatic fluctuation and concomitant ecological modifications in the patterns of distribution and differentiation of organisms in the American tropics as postulated by Haffer ( 1969 ) , Vanzolini and Williams (1970) and Miiller (1973). With the exception of Miiller (1973), who formulated a series of dispersal centers throughout South America, the biogeographic concerns have been primarily with the tropical regions, to the neglect of temperate South America. Southern South America has an endemic and evolutionarily important frog fauna, consisting primarily of telmatobiine lepto-dactylids. The major exception is the leptodactyline genus Pleuro-dema containing 14 species, only two of which occur in the tropics. Pleurodema hufomna is the southernmost frog, reaching the Straits of Magellan at 53° S Lat.; two species range northward in the Andes to Peru, and one extends to Panama and the Carribbean coast of South America (13° N Lat). Pleurodema are small (< 60mm), 1 Curator, Division of Herpetology, Museum of Natural History, and Pro-fessor, Department of Systematics and Ecology, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045, U.S.A. -Associate in Herpetology, Museum of Natural History, The University of Kansas, and Associate Professor, Departmento de Biologia Celular y Genetica, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 6556, Santiago, Chile.
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