New Faces, New Names and Old Friends: an Overview of the Kinosternon Diversity Project and Illustrated Guide to Morphological Characters

Abstract

The mud turtle genus Kinosternon of the Testudines family Kinosternidae represents the most speciose and most widely distributed grouping of extant freshwater turtles. Currently 33 taxa are recognized, with an aggregated geographical range from New England west and south throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America and South America to northern Argentina (TTWG 2021). Belying the species’ biodiversity is a taxonomic quagmire of lost and destroyed holotypes, unrecorded locality data, misidentification of specimens and characters, underevaluated morphology, lack of skeletal material, incomplete understanding of distributions and an avalanche of synonyms and literature. We undertook a taxonomic and morphological revision of specimens and species groups from southern Texas south throughout Mexico, Central and South America, resulting in numerous new proposals and discoveries that clarify distribution, morphology, taxonomy and nomenclature. We anticipate the formal results to be presented over a landscape of more than 40 contributions. In the first contribution, we present an overview of the morphology of the genus, and the methodology, the challenges faced and a visual guide to the suite of 246 morphological character states that we utilized to conduct the research.