Systematic revision, cladistics and biogeography of the genus Neogutierrezia Martínez (Coleoptera : Scarabaeidae) and its phylogenetic placement in Rutelinae based on structural alignment of 28S rDNA sequences

To all the curators and collection managers of the institutions listed in the material and methods section, and to Gastón Zurbarán for making material available for this research, we thank you very much! We thank Mary Liz Jameson for her critical review of the manuscript and most valuable comments. We also thank Aura Paucar (Bio-graphica International LLC) for her help and assistance with some of the line drawings that illustrate this work and Valeria Corbalán (IADIZA) for providing the base map for the species distribution. Federico Ocampo thanks David Hawks and John Heraty (University of California, Riverside) for the generous use of their molecular systematics laboratory and other resources and David Hawks for letting us to use some of the DNA sequences used in this work. This project was supported by NSF (The National Science Foundation, USA) through the following grants: PEET # 0118669, Biodiversity Surveys and Inventories # 0342189, DBI # 0500767, Advances in Biological Informatics # 0743783, and AToL # EF-0531768, and by CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina) through the following grants: PIP # 5766, PIP #112-200801-01869, and PIP # 112-200801-00162. The senior author thanks the University of Nebraska State Museum for providing funding to conduct field research in Argentina in 2005 and 2006. We all thank CONICET (Argentina) for its permanent support to our research. Federico Ocampo thanks the Instituto de Ciencias Básicas, Universidad de Cuyo for its ongoing support to his research.

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Appendix 1.  Morphological data matrix
Polymorphisms: A = 1&2, B = 0&1

Appendix 2.  Structural alignment of the expansion segments D2 and D3 of the 28S rRNA gene region from 23 scarabaeoid species
Notation above the sequences: Complementary strands are indicated with a prime (e. g. strand X hydrogen bonds with strand X′ to form helix X); regions of alignment ambiguity (RAA), slipped-strand compensation (RSC) and expansion and contraction (REC) are placed within square brackets; nucleotide positions within helices involved in hydrogen-bonding are depicted by parentheses in the mask; single insertions (*) and deletions (–) are noted as in Kjer et al. (2001). Note: the D2 alignment has not been amended for these 23 taxa but from the alignment of 103 beetle sequences by Marvaldi et al. (2009), and thus gaps and insertions may correspond to taxa not presented in this figure. Unambiguous synapomorphies of the ‘Neogutierrezia clade’ are shaded; those marked with an ‘x’ are unique changes

Appendix 2.  Continued.

Appendix 2.  Continued.

Appendix 2.  Continued.