Animal,

nservaçã lopment, The South American Cerrado is a vast tropical savanna that, despite an apparent uniformity in appearance, is characterized by rs et al., as a biodi hotspot, there is no consensus on which mechanisms main moted species diversification. Some of the non-mutually ex hypotheses to explain the Cerrado diversity (Colli et al., Werneck, 2011) include: (a) the plateau/depression hypothesis, which suggests old shields in the Brazilian Plateau (that uplifted during the late Tertiary) were separated by younger depressions (expanded by erosive processes during the Quaternary), resulting in older lineages associated with plateaus and younger lineages associated with depressions; (b) the marine transgressions hypoth-esis, which suggests that cycles of marine transgressions into the q This paper was edited by the Associate Editor K.H. Kozak. qq Data (aligned DNA sequences and phylogenies) are deposited in GenBank and the TreeBASE dataset. ⇑ Corresponding author