A Cybertaxonomic Revision of the " Crocidura pergrisea " Species Complex with a Special Focus on Endemic Rocky Shrews: Crocidura armenica and Crocidura arispa (Soricidae).

The extraction of museum DNA from a unique collection of samples of the " Crocidura pergrisea " species complex, which comprises local endemics of Central and West Asia, allowed us to determine their inter- and intragroup relationships. The first step of this study was the re-evaluation of heavily damaged type specimens of C. armenica via a microcomputed-tomography-based cybertaxonomic approach (CTtax), which enabled a precise description of the species' morphology; three-dimensional models of the cybertypes were made available through the MorphoBank Repository. We developed the "AProMaDesU" pipeline on the basis of five requirements for micro-CT-based cyber-datasets in relation to mammalian collections. Our second step was a combination of several meticulous approaches to morphological investigation against a background of a cytb -based phylogeny, which helped us to make a taxonomic decision about the status of species of the "pergrisea" group, e.g., C. arispa , C. armenica , and C. serezkyensis , when the morphological results were partly incongruent with the molecular phylogeny. Nevertheless, under two assumptions, our findings preserved a separate species-level status of C. serezkyensis and C. arispa . In addition, we restored the species-level status of C. armenica . This taxonomic decision is based on our morphospace analysis, which revealed unique craniomandibular shape transformations within the rocky shrews that helped them with the transition to a new area of morphospace/trophic niches and consequently separated them from the other analyzed Crocidura groups.