@article{3695796b656c4ed9ad6c1da0d0ef06d6,
title = "A new species of turtle-headed sea Snake (Emydocephalus: Elapidae) endemic to Western Australia",
abstract = "We describe a new species of turtle-headed sea snake Emydocephalus orarius sp. nov. (Elapidae) from Western Australia's Coral Coast, Pilbara and Kimberley regions. Phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial markers places the new species as the sister lineage to the two currently recognised species in Emydocephalus: E. annulatus from the Timor Sea reefs and Coral Sea, and E. ijimae from the Ryukyu Islands. Analysis of nuclear SNP data from the new species and E. annulatus from Australia and New Caledonia provides additional independent evidence of their evolutionary distinctiveness. The new taxon is usually morphologically diagnosable from its congeners using a combination of scalation and colour pattern characters, and appears to reach greater total lengths (>1 m in the new species versus typically ~80 cm in E. annulatus/E. ijimae). The new species is known largely from soft-bottomed trawl grounds, unlike E. annulatus and E.ijimae which usually inhabit coral reefs. The discovery of this new species brings the number of sea snake species endemic to Western Australia to six.",
keywords = "Australia, Hydrophiinae, Marine, Mitochondrial, RADseq, Systematics",
author = "Nankivell, {James H.} and Claire Goiran and Mathew Hourston and Richard Shine and Rasmussen, {Arne R.} and Thomson, {Vicki A.} and Sanders, {Kate L.}",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Mark Hutchinson (SAM) and Paul Doughty (WAM) for access to specimens in their care. This work is supported by an Australian Biological Resources Study NTRGP Grant (RF214-34) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to KLS (FT130101965). This work was supported with supercomputing resources provided by the Phoenix HPC service at the University of Adelaide. We would like to thank Jenna Crowe-Riddell and Vladimir Dinets for use of their photographs of live snakes. We would also like to thank the DPIRD trawl team for making their photograph library and data available for examination, John Keesing for use of tissue samples from the RV Investigator voyage number INV2017_05 and Vinay Udyawer, Jackson Crawford and Holly Hastings for providing tissue samples. We would like to thank the two reviewers for their comments which have greatly improved the paper. Publisher Copyright: Copyright {\textcopyright} 2020 Magnolia Press",
year = "2020",
month = mar,
day = "27",
doi = "10.11646/zootaxa.4758.1.6",
language = "English",
volume = "4758",
pages = "141--156",
journal = "Zootaxa",
issn = "1175-5326",
publisher = "Magnolia Press",
number = "1",
}