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The genus Stumpffia BOETTGER, 1881 currently contains 15 named, small to miniaturized frog species, classified in the endemic Malagasy subfamily Cophylinae of the family Microhylidae. Stumpffia are terrestrial frogs with a largely unknown biology, probably due to their small size and secretive habits. Previous studies have suggested a large proportion of undescribed diversity in the genus. We revise the genus on the basis of a combination of molecular, bioacoustic, and morphological data and describe 26 new species that are all genetically divergent, almost all of them with high pairwise genetic divergences> 4% p-distance in a segment of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene and concordant differentiation in a segment of the nuclear Rag-1 gene. The majority of the new species can also be distinguished by the structure of their advertisement calls (where bioacoustic data are available), and in most comparisons the species can also be distinguished morphologically.

Furthermore, a molecular phylogeny reconstructed from DNA sequences of one nuclear and four mitochondrial gene segments revealed that in many cases, morphologically similar species are not each other’s closest relatives, thus confirming their identity as independent evolutionary lineages and revealing repeated phenotypic divergence and convergence among and within clades. The phylogeny distinguishes