Pelagic Stingray - Taxonomy and Phylogeny

Taxonomy and Phylogeny

The pelagic stingray was originally described by French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in the 1832 third volume of Iconografia della fauna italica per le quattro classi degli animali vertebrati. He named it Trygon violacea, from the Latin viola ("purple"), and designated two specimens collected off Italy as the species syntypes. The genus Trygon has since been synonymized with Dasyatis. In 1910, American zoologist Henry Weed Fowler placed the pelagic stingray in the newly created subgenus Pteroplatytrygon, from the Greek pteron ("fin"), platus ("broad"), and trygon ("stingray"). Later authors elevated Pterplatytrygon to the rank of full genus, though some taxonomists dispute whether this species is distinct enough to warrant separation from Dasyatis.

Lisa Rosenberger's 2001 phylogenetic analysis, based on morphology, found that the pelagic stingray is one of the more basal members of its family, being the sister taxon to a clade that contains Pastinachus, Dasyatis, and Indo-Pacific Himantura species. Other common names for the pelagic stingray include the blue stingray and the violet stingray.