OrJ) « 1-2-8 OCCASIONAL PAPERS of the MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY The University of Kansas, ZOOU Lawrence, Kansas NUMBER 24, PAGES 1-60 |^pR 1 ^vf&l&H 27, 1974 HARVARD SYSTEMATICS AND EVODttJ^HSiWW THE GREATER ANTILLEAN HYLID FROGS By Linda Trueb 1 and Michael J. Tyler" The origins and number of ancestral stoeks of the hylid fauna of the West Indies have been debated. The twelve species are now allocated to the genus Hyla. The Lesser Antillean treefrog fauna is depauperate, consisting only of a member of the Hyla rubra complex which occurs on the island of Saint Lucia. The occurrence of this small hylid on only one of the islands in the Lesser Antilles is puzzling, unless Hyla rubra is a relatively recent immigrant or adventive from the South American fauna, as seems probable. The species (or closely related members of the species group) is present on the continental islands of Trinidad and Tobago and is widespread on mainland South America. Hyla squirella has been introduced to Grand Bahama (Crombie, 1972), and Hyla cinerea is an apparent adventive to Puerto Rico (Albert Schwartz, pers. com.); both are common in the southeastern United States. Eight of the remaining species are endemic to either Jamaica or Hispaniola, and the ninth species is rather widespread; it occurs on Cuba and the Isle of Pines, the Bahamas, and southern peninsular Florida and recently has been introduced to Puerto Rico. Unlike Hyla rubra of the Lesser Antilles, H. cinerea of Puerto Rico, and H. squirella of Grand Ba-hama in the aforementioned nine species, there are no immediately obvious affinities between these Greater Antillean species and main-land representatives. The systematic relationships among the nine 1 Adjunct Curator, Division of Herpetology, Museum of Natural History, and Department of Systematics and Ecology, The University of Kansas. 2 Honorary Associate in Herpetology of the South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000. Associate in Herpetology, Museum of Natural History, The University of Kansas.
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