Phylogeographic patterns of temperate species from the Mediterranean peninsulas have been investigated intensively. Nevertheless, as more phylogeographies become available, either unique patterns or new lines of concordance continue to emerge, providing new insights on the evolution of regional biotas. Here, we investigated the phylogeography and evolutionary history of the Italian crested newt...

Poly(A)-containing RNA was isolated from ovaries of Xenopus laevis laevis and Triturus cristatus carnifex and used as a template for the synthesis of radioactive complementary DNA with RNA-dependent DNA polymerase. When annealed with an excess of homologous DNA, the complementary DNA is rendered double-stranded with kinetics that suggest that the coding sequences are single-copy in both these o...

Nitric oxide synthase activity was studied by means of NADPH-diaphorase activity and nitric oxide synthase immunoreactivity in the main and accessory olfactory bulbs of the frog Rana perezi and the newt Triturus marmoratus. In both species, NADPH-diaphorase staining was observed in all olfactory fibers. Vomeronasal fibers were NADPH-diaphorase-positive in Triturus but they were NADPH-diaphorase...

The phylogenetic relationships for rapid species radiations are difficult to disentangle. Here we study one such case, namely the genus Triturus, which is composed of the marbled and crested newts. We analyze data for 38 genetic markers, positioned in 3-prime untranslated regions of protein-coding genes, obtained with 454 sequencing. Our dataset includes twenty Triturus newts and represents all...

Theories concerning the mode of origin of peripheral nucleoli in amphibian oocytes have been examined and tested. In Triturus cristatus the giant fusing loops of the 3 shortest lampbrush bivalents resemble nucleoli when viewed in phase contrast and may be considered as possible sites of production of nucleoli. Giant fusing loops, however, differ from peripheral nucleoli in certain important res...

Ecological thresholds are defined as points or zones at which a rapid change occurs from one ecological condition to another. The existence of thresholds in species-habitat relationships has important implications for management, but the lack of concordance across studies and the wide range of methods used make generalizations difficult. We used two different statistical methods to test for the...

Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) is one of the modelling techniques most recently applied to biodiversity conservation and it can be implemented with presence-only data through the generation of artificial absences (pseudo-absences). In this paper, three pseudo-absences generation techniques are compared, namely the generation of pseudo-absences within target-group background (TGB), testing both ...