Morphology and mitochondrial phylogenetics reveal that the Amazon River separates two eastern squirrel monkey...

Saimiri has a complicated taxonomic history, and there is continuing disagreement about the number of valid taxa. Despite these controversies, one point of consensus among morphologists has been that the eastern Amazonian populations of squirrel monkeys form a single terminal taxon, Saimiri sciureus sciureus (Linnaeus, 1758). This group is distributed to both the north and south of the middle to lower Amazon River and in the Marajó Archipelago. However, a recent molecular study by Lavergne and colleagues suggested that the Saimiri sciureus complex (comprised of S. s. sciureus sensu lato, S. s. albigena, S. s. macrodon, and S. s. cassiquiarensis) was paraphyletic. The discordance between morphological and molecular studies prompted us to conduct a new multidisciplinary analysis, employing a combination of morphological, morphometric, and molecular markers. Our results suggest the currently recognized taxon S. s. sciureus contains two distinct species, recognized by the Phylogenetic Species Concept: Saimiri sciureus (Linnaeus, 1758) and Saimiri collinsi Osgood, 1916. East Amazonian squirrel monkeys north of the Amazon have a gray crown (S. sciureus), and south of the Amazon, the crown is yellow (S. collinsi). Morphometric measurements also clearly distinguish between the two species, with the most important contributing factors including width across upper canines for both sexes. For males, the mean zygomatic breadth was significantly wider in S. sciureus compared to S. collinsi, and for females, the width across the upper molars was wider in S. sciureus compared to S. collinsi. Mitochondrial phylogenetic analyses support this separation of the eastern Amazonian squirrel monkeys into two distinct taxa, recovering one clade (S. sciureus) distributed to the north of the Amazon River, from the Negro River and Branco River to the Guiana coast and the Brazilian state of Amapá, and another clade (S. collinsi) south of the Amazon River, from the region of the Tapajós River to the state of Maranhão, as well as within the Marajó Archipelago. The revalidation of the species S. collinsi was corroborated by all of the methods in the study, as the clades recovered in our molecular study are congruent with the pattern of morphological variation. We confirm both the paraphyly of the Saimiri sciureus complex and the paraphyly of the subspecies S. s. sciureus as defined in the current literature.