A Return to Rana
By Richard Bartlett · January 2, 2017 12:26 am
A bronze frog, Rana c. clamitans The controversial generic name of Lithobates has been laid to rest—at least for Holarctic frog taxa. Holarctic? What, exactly, does that mean and what frog species does it encompass? Meriam Webster dictionary defines the term Holarctic thusly: “of, relating to, or being the biogeographic region including the northern parts of the Old and the New Worlds and comprising the Nearctic and Palearctic regions or subregions”. Or defined by the Free Dictionary as “a floristic and zoogeographic land area that occupies the extratropical portion of the northern hemisphere; its southern boundary lies roughly along the northern boundary of the Tropic of Cancer”. In a Facebook post, geneticist David Hillis states “Our paper on the systematics and biogeography of Rana (Holarctic true frogs) is now available as a pdf at this link (final volume and page numbers to come): http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/syw055. The actual name of the paper is Spatiotemporal Diversification of the True Frogs (Genus Rana): A Historical Framework for a Widely Studied Group of Model Organisms and Dr. Hillis was one of the 15 authors. With this paper Lithobates is gone and Rana is back! To Dr. Hillis and the 14 coauthors I extend my profound “thanks.”
A southern crawfish frog, Rana a. areolata
A pickerel frog, Rana palustris
