Ovophis tonkinensis Found in Congjiang, Guizhou, China
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1.State Key Laboratory of Plateau Ecology and Agriculture, Qinghai University, Xining 810016; 2.School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026; 3.Anhui Province Key Laboratory of the Conservation and Exploitation of Biological Resource, College of Life Sciences, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu 241000, China

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    Abstract:

    The pitviper genus Ovophis is widely distributed in the mountainous areas of Asia, with elevations ranging from 540 to 2 400 m. Due to its mysterious lifestyle, specimen collection is often difficult, resulting in relatively limited data on species of the genus Ovophis. Previously, O. tonkinensis was only reported to be distributed in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, and Hong Kong, China. During a field survey in February 2024, a road-killed specimen of the genus Ovophis was collected from Congjiang County, Guizhou Province, China (25°55′45″ N, 109°04′03″ E, altitude 360 m). The following morphological characters of this specimen were examined:(1) adult male, total length 403 mm, tail length 81 mm, tail length/total length 0.20; (2) infralabials 11; (3) one pair of chin shields; (4) dorsal scale rows 27-27-21; (5) vertebral scales row of tail single and enlarged; (6) ventral scales 129, subcaudal pairs 49; (7) cloacal plate entire (Fig. 2). The new cytochrome b (Cyt b) gene fragment in this study has been deposited in GenBank, and the other sequences of the genus Ovophis used were retrieved from GenBank (Table 1). Based on Cyt b gene fragments, we performed maximum likelihood phylogenetic analyses in IQ-TREE 1.6.12 and calculated the uncorrected genetic distances within Ovophis in MEGA X. The phylogenetic analyses revealed that the newly collected specimen and O. tonkinensis clustered together (Fig. 1), with a genetic distance of 1.4%﹣2.1% (Table 2). Based on the morphological comparison and molecular phylogenetic analysis results, the specimen was identified as O. tonkinensis, which is a new record of reptiles to Guizhou Province, China.

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XU Yu-Hao, LIU Dan, WEI Hai-Xiao, GONG Yan-An, HUANG Song, PENG Li-Fang. 2025. Ovophis tonkinensis Found in Congjiang, Guizhou, China. Chinese Journal of Zoology, 60(1): 115-121.

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  • Received:April 12,2024
  • Revised:
  • Adopted:
  • Online: March 04,2025
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