Instead, these sequences grouped with those of B.
pacificus, ruling out a human-mediated introduction from any known population. However, sequences of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome b ( cytb) did not place the Point Arguello samples within B. Tissue samples assayed by Jockusch confirmed that these were members of the B. In size, coloration, and pattern, these individuals were sufficiently similar to Batrachoseps pacificus from the northern Channel Islands that we initially suspected an introduction in materials transported by the Coast Guard from their facilities on Anacapa or Santa Cruz Islands to the mainland station at Point Arguello. Base biologist Nancy Sandburg collected a second individual at the same site on 22 May and brought the two individuals to Sweet's lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 1), but ManTech biologist Morgan Ball recognized that this animal was not morphologically consistent with this species and urged a wider search. This region is within the range depicted for Batrachoseps nigriventris ( Fig. Wes Fritz discovered a large Batrachoseps under debris at the abandoned Coast Guard station at Point Arguello, California, USA on Vandenberg Space Force Base. The rest resulted from analyses of molecular data, which led to the recognition of substantial additional genetic diversity and sharp contact zones within a relatively conserved morphology ( Yanev, 1980 Jockusch et al., 1998, 2001, 2012). Six of these species represented newly discovered lineages, primarily from outside the known range of the genus at the time of discovery, that were also straightforward to diagnose morphologically ( Brame and Murray, 1968 Marlow et al., 1979 Wake, 1996 Wake et al., 2002). Batrachoseps is the most species-rich amphibian clade on the west coast of North America the number of recognized species has increased from four prior to the work of Brame and Murray (1968) to 21, including one with two morphologically divergent subspecies, at present ( Jockusch et al., 2015). Both processes have played substantial roles in the large increase in number of recognized amphibian species ( Köhler et al., 2005), including in the plethodontid salamander genus Batrachoseps. While, in many cases, species discovery results from molecular analyses that show high genetic divergence or other evidence of reproductive isolation among known populations previously classified as a single species ( Jackman, 1998 Shaffer et al., 2004 Kuchta, 2007 Feldman and Hoyer, 2010 Jackson et al., 2017 Bingham et al., 2018), other cases involve the discovery of distinctive new taxa ( Köhler et al., 2005 Mead et al., 2005 Graham et al., 2018). New vertebrate species continue to be discovered even in well-studied regions with long histories of faunistic investigations.