Dark Shyshark - Taxonomy and Phylogeny

Taxonomy and Phylogeny

German physicians and biologists Johannes Peter Müller and Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle originally described the dark shyshark in their 1838–41 Systematische Beschreibung der Plagiostomen, based on five specimens caught off the Cape of Good Hope and deposited in the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden, The Netherlands. Because of the shark's ornate coloration, they gave it the specific epithet pictum from the Latin for "painted". Originally placed in the now-obsolete genus Scyllium, subsequent authors moved this species to the genus Haploblepharus, coined by American zoologist Samuel Garman in 1913.

The dark shyshark was often regarded to be the same as the puffadder shyshark (H. edwardsii) until 1975, with the publication of A.J. Bass, Jeanette D'Aubrey, and Nat Kistnasamy's review of southern African sharks. It continues to be confused for the other three shyshark species because of its extremely variable coloration. The common name "pretty Happy" ("Happy" refers to the genus name Haploblepharus) was recently introduced to the public as an easily remembered alternative to the colloquial names "shyshark" and "doughnut", which can apply to several species and have confounded research efforts. Brett Human's 2006 phylogenetic analysis, based on three mitochondrial DNA genes, found that the dark shyshark and the brown shyshark (H. fuscus) are sister species, and that the two make up the more derived clade within the genus.