Phylogenetic Systematics of the Amolops Group of Ranid Frogs of Southeastern Asia and the Greater Sunda Islands Introduction The genus Amolops is a large group of ranid frogs that lives in mountain brooks of southeastern Asia. The distinctive characters of the group are the presence in tadpoles of an abdominal sucker and ventral and dorsal poison glands. Cope (1865, p. 117) erected the genus Amolops for Polypedates afghana Gunther, 1858, and di-agnosed the genus as "terminal phalanges short; transverse limb long; tongue without median in-ferior prominence; no dorso-lateral glandular folds; vomerine teeth." On the same page, Cope de-scribed another new genus, Staurois, which he di-agnosed by "terminal phalanges slender, with short transverse limb; tongue with median inferior prominence; no dorso-lateral folds; no vomerine teeth; ethmoid widely separating prefrontals, and these from frontoparietal." The type species of Staurois is Ixalus natator Gunther, 1858 (by sub-sequent designation of Boulenger, 1918). In 1887 Boulenger described three tadpoles of Rana afghana (Gunther) (= Polypedates afghana), collected from rapid streams in the Kakhi Hills, India. These tadpoles had an adhesive abdominal disk (Hora, 1932) and a denticle formula of 111:5— 5/1-1:111. Noble (1927, p. 107) wrote, "One nat-ural group of species often referred to Rana is characterized by mountain-brook larvae equipped with a large adhesive or friction disk on the ab-domen. . . . The only other Salientia possessing such tadpoles have been grouped together as a distinct genus Staurois. ... I have referred them all to Staurois." Noble obviously did not recognize the genus Amolops, despite the presence of an ab-dominal sucker and poison glands in larvae. After Noble (1927), some herpetologists such as Pope (1927), Noble (1931), Pope and Boring (1940), Bourret (1942), Liu (1950), and Liu and Hu (1961), as well as the Herpetology Group of Sichuan In-stitute of Biology ( 1 977), continued to use the name Staurois. Inger (1966) presented the basic argu-ments for treating Amolops as distinct from Stau-rois. In fact, Staurois is different from Amolops in five characters: poison glands and abdominal sucker absent in larvae; vomerine teeth absent; two foramina on the exoccipital bone, and a car-tilaginous edge on the posterior horn of the hyoid present in adults. The most recent checklist (Matsui, in Frost, 1985) included 23 species of Amolops. Three new Bornean species were described by Matsui (1986), and one new species from Yunnan was described by Su et al. (1986). I described a new species from Yunnan, China (Yang, 1987) and am describing three new species from Java, Sumatra, and Nepal in this paper. Therefore, there are 32 known spe-cies of the Amolops group in southeastern Asia and the Greater Sunda Islands. Materials and Methods I have examined specimens from amnh, fmnh, nmnh, ummz (United States); ku (Japan); bmnh (England); rmnh, zma (Netherlands); and cm, ftc, kjz, smnh (People's Republic of China). I dissected and examined skulls, sterna, hyoid apparatuses, metacarpalia, and some muscles of the hand of most species of Amolops, as well as external char-acters of all. I also examined the same characters in the eight outgroups (see below). I include de-tailed descriptions of the tadpoles of each species. Measurements were made following the system outlined by Liu and Hu (1961). Snout-vent length is abbreviated as SVL. Head width is the distance YANG: AMOLOPS FROGS
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