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Second report of the southern painted turtle, Chrysemys dorsalis (testudines: emydidae), from Texas, with comments on its genetic relationship to other populations.

Article Excerpt
The southern painted turtle, Chrysemys dorsalis (Agassiz 1857) is a medium-sized emydid turtle that ranges from western Tennessee south through Alabama and Mississippi and westward to eastern Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas (Ernst 1971; Iverson 1992; Conant & Collins 1998; Dixon 2002; Trauth et al. 2004). It is one of the best well-studied of all freshwater turtles (see Ernst & Barbour 1989).

Starkey et al. (2003) recognized two evolutionary lineages within the genus, C. dorsalis in the southern Mississippi drainage region and Chrysemys picta from the rest of the range of the genus, including records of the latter from Culberson and El Paso counties in far west Texas (Strecker 1915; Carr 1952; Raun & Gehlbach 1972; Thomas 1976; Dixon 2000). Near the northeastern border of Texas (part of the AR-LA-TX region), there are Oklahoma records of C. dorsalis in the extreme southeastern part of the state in McCurtain County (Webb 1970) and records from Bossier and Caddo parishes of northwestern Louisiana (Dundee & Rossman 1989); however, this turtle has not yet been reported in southwestern Arkansas west of the Ouachita...

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