Anabela Cardoso

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use mitochondrial DNA variation to delimit species in a poorly known beetle radiation in the genus Rivacindela from arid Australia, using a new likelihood method that determines the point of transition from species-level (speciation and extinction) to population-level evolutionary processes.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used permutational contingency analysis to test the congruence of morphological characters with DNA-based nesting groups at various hierarchical levels, and found significant statistical associations of 11 (of 13 variable) characters were observed with nesting groups from ITS1 and mitochondrial DNA markers.

TL;DR: The evolutionary framework based on mtDNA sequences is shown to identify species entities as discrete clusters of closely related sequences and provides an objective system for delineating and recognizing hierarchically structured groups in the C. hybrida complex.

TL;DR: Major clades of Cicindela are found to be geographically largely coincident with continental regions, confined to Australasia, the Holarctic, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and South and Central America.

TL;DR: The results suggest that some properties of 3rd positions are less problematic for phylogenetic reconstruction than other categories despite their high total homoplasy, and may be dependent on the character states at other sites, consistent with the covarion model of molecular evolution.