Niviventer confucianus sacer (Rodentia, Muridae) is a distinct species based on molecular, karyotyping, and morphological evidence

Abstract Niviventer confucianus sacer Thomas, 1908, which has been regarded as a subspecies of N. confucianus, was found to be a distinct species from N. confucianus based on molecular, karyotyping, and morphological characteristics in this study. Niviventer c. sacer was found to belong to a distinct phylogenetic clade in phylogenetic tree constructed using the mitochondrial gene Cytb, it clustered with N. bukit (Bonhote, 1903) from Vietnam and N. confucianus (Milne-Edwards, 1871) from Yunnan, but showed a distant relationship with N. confucianus from adjacent areas. The genetic distance between N. c. sacer and N. confucianus was more than 5.8%, reaching the level of interspecific differentiation. The species delimitation indicates that N. c. sacer is a monophyletic group. The karyotype of N. c. sacer (FN = 55, 8m+4st+32t+X(sm)Y(t)) differed from that of N. confucianus (FN = 59, 6m+4sm+2st+32t+X(sm)Y(t)). In terms of morphological features, the length of incisive foramen (LIF) and length of auditory bulla (LAB) of N. c. sacer is significantly larger than that of N. confucianus and N. bukit (P < 0.05) and the proportion of white tail tip to total tail length is significantly longer at N. c. sacer (≥ 1/3) than that at N. confucianus (≤ 1/3). Therefore, integrated analysis confirmed that N. c. sacer is a distinct species of genus Niviventer rather than a subspecies of N. confucianus or N. bukit, namely N. sacer, which is only distributed in Shandong.


Introduction
Niviventer confucianus sacer Thomas (1908) was named based on specimens collected from Mount Ai, Yantai, Shandong, China (type locality) according to its different morphology from N. confucianus in other areas. The holotype (NHMUK 8.2.8.8) is preserved in the Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK). Thomas (1908) described it as a buff-grey subspecies of N. confucianus, with the tail long-haired and white-tipped. However, the taxonomic status of N. c. sacer remains controversial. These species were originally classified in the genus Mus and later in Rattus (Thomas 1908;Allen 1926), but the genus name was changed to Niviventer, established by Musser (1981). Niviventer c. sacer has been adopted as a subspecies of N. confucianus by taxonomists based on morphology. Allen (1940) considered N. c. sacer as one of the four subspecies of N. confucianus; Wang and Zheng (1981) divided N. confucianus into six subspecies and pointed out that N. c. sacer were distributed in Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu of central China; Huang et al. (1995) identified N. c. sacer as one of the eight subspecies of N. confucianus; Smith and Xie (2009) extended the view of Wang (2003) and considered that N. confucianus distributed in most northern areas of the Yangtze River in China were N. c. sacer.
In terms of molecular phylogeny, Zhang et al. (2016) estimated phylogenetic relationships using topotype specimens of white-bellied rats in China based on multi-locus analysis and firstly used five specimens from Yantai, Shandong. They found that N. c. sacer formed an independent clade in the phylogenetic tree and a sister clade with N. confucianus and N. bukit, indicating that N. c. sacer is a sister species or branch of N. confucianus. However, Zhang et al. (2016) considered that this genetic difference did not reach the species level. Ge et al. (2018a, b) analyzed a larger number of specimens to evaluate the internal differentiation of N. confucianus based on the above study, the results showed that N. c. sacer from Shandong were not clustered within the clades of N. confucianus, but were most closely related to N. confucianus from Yunnan and N. bukit from Vietnam. Therefore, they considered that N. c. sacer might not be a member of N. confucianus, but rather N. bukit. Karyotyping studies have shown that the chromosomal fundamental arm number (FN) and karyotypes of N. confucianus from Shandong were significantly different from those from Guangdong, Shaanxi, and Thailand. The karyotype of N. confucianus from Shandong (N. c. sacer) was 2n = 46, FN = 55, 8m+4st+32t+X(sm)Y(t), whereas that from Thailand was 2n = 46, FN = 58, 6m+6sm+2st+30t+X(t)+Y(t); that from Guangdong was 2n = 46, FN = 54, 6m+38t+X(sm)Y(t); and that from Shaanxi was 2n = 46, FN = 58, 8m+2sm+2st+32t+X(sm)Y(t) (Jiang 1995;Wang et al. 1997;Wang et al. 2003).
The Shandong Peninsula is surrounded on three sides by the Bohai and Huanghai seas. The southwest mountain area and east hill area are isolated by consecutive plains of North China Plain and middle and lower Yangtze River plain. Also, the plain separates mountain habitats in Shandong from those in adjacent areas, forming unique topographical features. Between the southwest mountains and east hills in Shandong is the Jiaolai Plain, which forms an inner isolated area. Studies showed that the unique topographical features in Shandong resulted in the development of endemic species.
For example, Rana kunyuensis is only distributed in Mount Kunyu in Yantai, Shandong, and Pseudohaplotropis culaishanica is only distributed in Mount Culai in Shandong. These new species are unique to the habitats of Shandong and were discovered in recent years (Lu and Li 2002;Cao and Yin 2008). More detailed study is needed to understand the diversity of the region.
Molecular methods are effective for identifying sister species with similar appearance and detecting cryptic species in species complexes (Francis et al. 2010;Chen et al. 2011;Lu et al. 2015;Zhang et al. 2016;Li et al. 2019). Geometric morphometrics is a statistics-based quantitative way of comparing shape (morphology) across different specimens. It not only offers the ability to describe shape precisely and accurately, but also facilitates visualization and interpretation of results of the analysis. With the development and improvement of geometric morphometry, it has become an important method to study the morphological differentiation between species and within species, and has been widely used in rodents (Cardini and O'Higgins 2004;Renaud and Michaux 2007;Lu et al. 2015;Alhajeri 2018). In this study, we systematically reassessed the taxonomic status of N. c. sacer by using the mitochondrial Cytb sequence as a molecular marker to analyze phylogenetic relationships. We also used the automatic barcode gap discovery (ABGD) method to define the species status combined with karyotyping results, morphological characteristics, and measurement indices.

Sample collection and ethics
A total of 214 specimens of N. confucianus species complex was collected from 35 sampling sites in China using Sherman living cages from March 2009 to August 2018. The sampling sites covered the distribution range of N. confucianus (Fig. 1), and sample information is shown in Suppl. material 1: Table S1. Chromosome preparations were made by the live bone marrow method (Searle 1986). All specimens including the pelt, carcass, and skull were stored at Shandong University (Weihai). All animal sample collection protocols complied with the current laws of China and all animals were handled in a manner consistent with the guidelines approved by the American Society of Mammalogists (Sikes et al. 2016).
All sequences were aligned with Clustal X 2.0 (Larkin et al. 2007), manually edited in BioEdit 7.2.5 (Hall 1999), and corrected to eliminate interference from degener-ate bases. We used the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) in jModeltest 1.0 (Posada 2008) to select the best-fit model of sequence evolution for locus alignment. We calculated the population haplotypes in DnaSP (Librado and Rozas 2009) and performed phylogenetic reconstructions based on Cytb using the maximum likelihood (ML) and neighbor-joining (NJ) approaches with the TN93+G+I model and K2P model in MEGA 7 (Kumar et al. 2016), respectively. Bootstraps were obtained using a rapid bootstrapping algorithm with 1000 replicates. We also constructed a phylogenetic tree using Bayesian inference (BI) in MrBayes 3.2 (Ronquist et al. 2012, Balakirev et al. 2013) based on the TN93 model. This step was repeated twice, the replacement rate of the sequence with invgamma was determined, and the process was conducted four Markov chain Monte Carlo runs with four chains for 10 million generations, sampling every 1000 trees and discarding the first 25% as burn-in. We calculated Kimura-2-parameter (K2P) distances of Cytb in MEGA 7 (Kumar et al. 2016) for pairwise comparisons of genetic differentiation within and between different phylogenetic lineages, and standard error was analyzed using 1000 bootstrap tests.

Species delimitation
We used ABGD (Puillandre et al. 2012) to recover candidate species. All aligned haplotype sequences (166 Cytb) were uploaded to the web interface (http://wwwabi.snv.jussieu.fr/public/abgd/abgdweb.html) and run with the following settings: P (prior limit to intraspecific diversity) range of 0.001-0.1 and relative gap widths (X) of 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5. Transition/transversion bias (TS/TV) was estimated using MEGA 7. We selected the Kimura 80 model to analyze our data and set the number of both steps and bins to 25.

Karyotype analysis
We captured and analyzed the mitotic phase with improved chromosome dispersion using Cytovision System (Applied Imaging, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK). The diploid number (2n) and chromosome fundamental arm number (FN) were determined in each karyotype. Chromosomes were classified according to Levan et al. (1964) and Motokawa et al. (2001) to analyze the differences in karyotypes among different clades.

Morphological analysis
To understand the morphological diversity of N. confucianus, N. c. sacer, N. bukit and N. lotipes, which are closely related species in N. confucianus species complex, we explored differences in external and skull morphology among the four species, in which the measurements data of N. bukit was reference to Ge et al. (2018b), the other three were collected and measured by our laboratory. We determined four external indices (head and body length (HBL); tail length (TL); ear length (EL); hind foot length (HFL)) and eight skull indices (greatest length of skull (LS); zygomatic width (ZW); interorbital breadth (IOB); breadth of rostrum (BR); length of incisive foramen (LIF); length of upper tooth row (LUTR); length of auditory bulla (LAB); length of upper diastema (LD)) according to Huang et al. (1995), Yang et al. (2005), Xia et al. (2006), and Ge et al. (2018b). Skull indices were measured with a digital vernier caliper (0.01 mm). Adult specimens were identified by the full eruption of the molars and the frequency histogram of head and body length (Yang 1990, Li et al. 1989, 1990. Male and female specimens were mixed in analyses since previous studies identified no significant differences in the external and cranial measurements between sexes (Stefen and Rudolf 2007;Yang et al. 2011).
To characterize the differences among the four species, standard statistics including the mean and standard error were applied. Pairwise differences between major species groups were tested by an analysis of variance (ANOVA) using least significant difference (LSD) tests, as LSD is more commonly used and sensitive to obtain statistical differences, and multivariate analysis (principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, cluster analysis) was also performed. These analyses were performed using SPSS Statistics 24.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA).
We photographed the skulls of specimens of N. confucianus, N. c. sacer and N. lotipes for quantitative analysis (as N. bukit was not sampled). The dorsal, ventral, and lateral sides of the skull and lateral view of the mandible were analyzed separately. Landmarks are homologous site of geometric morphology with biological significance on the specimen, which were selected to reflect the shape of the mandible (Bookstein 1991). Landmarks and semi-landmarks were digitized in tpsDig 2.30 (Rohlf 2017), and their location is shown in Suppl. material 2: Figure S1. The raw datasets for each of the above four views were examined to evaluate whether the specimens greatly deviated from the average values. Generalized procrustes analysis (GPA) was used to carry out the superimposition of landmarks, in order to remove shape-irrelevant variables like size, orientation and position from the original landmark configurations, leaving the real shape information. This is a necessary step in geometric morphometric analysis (Gower 1975, Rohlf andSlice 1990). Relative distortion analysis was performed with tpsRelw, and the relative warp score (RW) was determined. Principal component analysis was conducted to visualize shape differences between individuals, and thin-plate spline transformation grids of extreme value were used to show skull shape differences (Bookstein, 1997;Slice, 2007).
We also analyzed the dorsal hair color, spiny-ness of hairs, yellow patches, and white tail tip of N. c. sacer, N. confucianus and N. lotipes to compare external morphological features by Chi-square test. The dorsal hairs color and spiny-ness of hairs were identified by observing and touching on pelage of specimens on three-category records, as the color of dorsal hairs were all brown, tan and all yellow; the spiny-ness of hairs were hard, medium and soft; the yellow patches on the chest observed by direct observations of pelage specimen with confirmation of specimen photos, which were recorded by dichotomy, yes or no; and the white tail tip was calculated based on the ratio of the measured tail tip length to the total tail length, divided into 4 ranks: 0, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2.

Sequence data
We obtained 1140 bp of mitochondrial Cytb sequences from 312 individuals with 166 haplotypes in this study. Among them, there were 708 conserved loci, 395 parsimoniously informative loci, and 37 single-variant loci; no insertion, deletion, or termination codons were found. The transition/transversion bias was 5.40, and nucleotides in all sequences were accurately translated into amino acids.

Phylogenetic relationships
The phylogenetic trees constructed based on haplotype data using the NJ, ML, and BI methods showed essentially the same topology with high confidence values (Fig.  2, Suppl. material 2: Figs S2, S3): (1) the N. confucianus individuals clustered into three well-supported clades (i.e., clades C1, C2, C3). Clade C1 is distributed in southwestern Yunnan and southeastern Tibet; Clade C2 is found from central to northern China, and includes two haplotypes of Linyi and Zibo from Shandong; Clade C3 extended from the north of Southeast Asia to central China.
(2) N. c. sacer split into two deep subclades in the central Shandong and Yantai, Weihai regions; interestingly, N. bukit from Vietnam and two haplotypes from Xishuangbanna in Yunnan clustered into one clade, forming a sister clade to N. c. sacer.
According to the constructed phylogenetic relationship, the K2P genetic distances within and between each clade were calculated. Genetic distances were found to range from 0.011 to 0.022 within the four clades and 0.053 to 0.084 between the four clades (N. confucianus, N. sacer, N. lotipes, and N. bukit). Among them, the genetic distance between N. c. sacer and N. bukit showed the lowest value (0.053); however, the genetic distance between N. c. sacer and other species was higher than 0.058 (Table 1).
The species tree constructed by ABGD based on genetic distance is shown in Figure 3. The N. confucianus specimens are included in seven groups (groups 11-17), the haplotypes of N. c. sacer appeared as a monophyletic group (group 12), and the haplotypes of N. confucianus from Xishuangbanna in the Yunnan (group 16) and N. bukit from Vietnam (group 4) corresponded to N. bukit clade in the phylogenetic tree.

Morphological analysis
A total of 98 adult individuals of N. confucianus, N. c. sacer and N. lotipes was screened by age identification, and the complete external indices of 84 individuals and skull indices of 72 individuals were obtained. Most characteristics showed normal distributions (P > 0.05), and thus we performed parametric statistics analysis (Suppl. material 2: Table S3). Information on general variation in body form of the four species is given in Table 2 and Suppl. material 2: Tables S4 and S5. The ANOVA results showed significant morphological differences between the species in external indices and most skull indices (Suppl. material 2: Table S4). Multiple comparison results showed the skull indices (LIF and LAB) of N. c. sacer are significantly larger than those of other three species (Table 2, Suppl. material 2: Table S5).
In the PCA of external indices, two factors had eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, and the first two axes captured 36.6% and 27.6% of the total variation, accordingly (Table 3). The TL and EL provided the greatest contribution to the factor loadings of PC1(0.764 and 0.619, respectively; Table 3). PC2 was mainly influenced by HBL (-0.711; Table 3). The main scatter plots showed that the specimens from the four species had greatly mixed external indices, indicating they cannot be distinguished by the external measurement method alone (Fig. 5a). In the PCA of skull indices, the first two axes captured 54.1% and 16.4% of the total variation, accordingly. LS, LD and LIF are the three measurements that have the highest correlation with PC1(0.936, 0.875 and 0.874, respectively; Table 3), which is obviously associated with size, as all the meas-    Table 3), which seems to be a shape factor given the different magnitudes and signs. The changes of length of auditory bulla and breath of rostrum are associated with PC2. The main scatter plots showed that the four species mix with each other, but part of N. c. sacer can separated from those of others (Fig. 5b, Table 3). In discriminant analysis, 68.3-80.3% of the individuals were correctly classified (Suppl. material 2: Table S6). The scatter plots of the discriminant function showed that individuals between clades were more likely to be confused based on external indices; however, based on skull indices, most individuals of N. c. sacer were accurately identified and classified, whereas a few individuals were easily confused with N. confucianus but completely separated from N. bukit and N. lotipes (Fig. 5c, d).
Cluster analysis of external and skull measurement indices showed that the distributions of N. c. sacer and other three species are mixed and mosaic in the dendrogram (Suppl. material 2: Fig. S5), indicating that N. c. sacer and its close relatives cannot be distinguished based on traditional morphological characteristics.

Geometric morphometric analysis
The average configuration of the superimposition on the dorsal, ventral, lateral view of the skull and lateral view of the mandible of the three species is shown in Suppl. material 2: Figure S6. The main scatter plots constructed using RW1 and RW2 revealed no clear line between the three clades, indicating that variation in the samples from the three clades is not obvious, and geometric morphometric cannot distinguish the samples in the three clades (Fig. 6). The thin-plate spline transformation grids of extreme value showed that there are some variations between the three clades (highlighted in red boxes): the maxilla of N. c. sacer is slightly wider than those of N. confucianus and N. lotipes in the dorsal view of the skull (Fig. 7a). The auditory vesicle of N. c. sacer is slightly larger than those of N. confucianus and N. lotipes in the ventral view of skull (Fig. 7b). The height of basion of N. confucianus is slightly higher than those of N. c. sacer and N. lotipes, and the top of the skull tended to be rounder in the lateral view of the skull (Fig. 7c). Samples from N. c. sacer showed a narrower coronal process of the mandibular teeth in the lateral view of the mandible (Fig. 7d). However, each deformation was not obvious enough to distinguish samples between the three species.

External morphological features
In a comparison of the external morphological features of N. c. sacer, N. confucianus, and N. lotipes, we found that samples in the three clades could not be distinguished based on the dorsal hair color and yellow patches, but there were significant differences (P < 0.05) in the spiny hairs and white tail tip: the spiny hairs of N. c. sacer is softer than those in the other clades; the tail color of N. c. sacer is the upper brownish black, the lower white, whereas the proportion of the white tail tip is more than 1/3, which is the same as the holotype specimens first found by Thomas (1908) in Yantai, Shandong.  The ventral surface of the tail in N. confucianus is brownish black, the proportion of the white tail tip is less than 1/3, and the tail is more often without white hairs in N. lotipes, with a proportion of white hair of less than 1/4 (Table 4, Suppl. material 2: Fig. S7).

Discussion
Taxonomic status of N. c. sacer We analyzed specimens from across China and surrounding countries and recover evidence that Niviventer confucianus sacer should be elevated to Niviventer sacer. Molecular phylogenetic analysis indicated that N. sacer formed a sister branch with N. confucianus from Yunnan and N. bukit from Vietnam rather than with N. confucianus from adjacent areas in Shandong (Shanxi, Jiangsu, Hebei, Henan, etc.), which is consistent with the results of Ge et al. (2018a, b). Niviventer sacer is also distinct according to the species delimitation (ABGD method), and the genetic distance (K2P) between N. sacer and N. confucianus was as high as 5.8%, whereas that with N. bukit was 5.3%, both exceeding the empirical threshold of dividing rodent species (5%, Avise and Walker 1999;Baker and Bradley 2006;Zhang et al. 2019), revealing that N. sacer is a distinct species. In contrast to the conclusions of Ge et al. (2018a, b), who suggested that N. c. sacer may be a population of N. bukit, we consider that they are two independent species based on the following four reasons: (1) in terms of geographical distribution, N. sacer and N. bukit are distributed in Shandong and Vietnam, respectively, separated by a distance of more than 2,000 kilometers; (2) Zhang et al. (2016) used nuclear genes to construct a multilocus phylogeny tree, indicating that N. c. sacer was nested among several geographically-adjacent subspecies of N. confucianus to the exclusion of N. bukit; (3) Ge et al. (2018b) only used Cytb and the number of specimens of N. c. sacer was limited, and for this reason N. c. sacer was clustered with N. bukit rather than N. confucianus, it may be the misleading effect of rapid or saturation mutation of Cytb; (4) Morphological analysis shows there are significant differences between N. sacer and N. bukit in external and skull indices.
Interestingly, N. sacer distributed in the east hills and southwest mountains in Shandong is divided into two independent small lineages. However, N. confucianus is only distributed in the southwest mountains (Mount Lu and Mount Meng) in the Shandong area and forms the same clade with N. confucianus from adjacent areas. Therefore, N. sacer and N. confucianus show sympatry characteristics in the southwest mountains area, but their genetic distance (5.6%) is higher than 5% and they have significantly different karyotypes and morphologies. The sympatry of N. sacer and N. confucianus in the southwest mountains indicates that they are distinct species rather than subspecies without hybridization.
Morphological analysis showed that N. sacer, N. bukit, N. confucianus, and N. lotipes had significantly different morphological characteristics, which are reflected in the larger skull, but have similar skull shapes and characteristics. The morphological characteristics of the tail are important traits for distinguishing different species and are probably associated with adaptations for an arboreal lifestyle in different forest types. Moreover, tails may play important roles in the recognition of conspecifics (Siegel 1970, Ge et al. 2018b. In a comparison of the morphological characteristics of N. sacer and N. confucianus, we found a significant difference in tail color: the upper tail color of N. sacer is brownish black, while the lower color is white, and approximately one-third of the tip was all white, which has been observed in holotype specimens found by Thomas (1908) in Yantai, Shandong; in contrast, the tail of most N. confucianus are brown-black with only a white tail tip.

Phylogenetic evaluation
The phylogenetic tree results showed that N. confucianus species complex is mainly divided into four clades. The first clade is N. confucianus, which is found in central China, extending from the northeast to southwest of China; The second clade is N. sacer, which is endemic to Shandong; The third clade is N. lotipes, which is distributed in the southeast of China; The four clade is distributed in southwestern Yunnan and southeastern Tibet, which has been considered as a new combination, N. pianmaensis Ge et al. 2018b. The range of the four species are consistent with Ge et al. (2018a, b). Ge et al. (2018a, b) conducted molecular phylogeny analysis of a species complex of common wild rat species in China and observed the historical dynamics of N. confucianus based on coalescence models. It was predicted that N. c. sacer was not a subspecies of N. confucianus, but rather N. bukit, and no N. confucianus was found in Shandong. The present study demonstrates that N. sacer is a valid species distributed only in Shandong.
The minimum genetic distance (K2P) between the four clades in this study was 0.053. The results of ABGD species delimitation showed that N. confucianus are divided into seven groups which are consistent with the phylogenetic tree.
In this study, N. sacer was found to be a relatively recent divergence from N. confucianus, which differs from the results of Zhang et al. (2016) and Ge et al. (2018a, b). We used more specimens from the east hills branch and southwest mountains branch of N. sacer, which also indicated that different datasets had significant effects on the systematic evolution relationship analysis within the genus Niviventer.
In addition, the phylogenetic findings in this study are similar to those of Lu et al. (2015) and Zhang et al. (2016), who observed paraphyly among N. andersoni and N. excelsior, and N. fulvescens and N. huang. Niviventer fulvescens and N. huang form a clade in the phylogenetic tree; genetic distance within the clade is 0.019 and these species formed a group according to the ABGD method. Therefore, N. huang may require synonymization with N. fulvescens. The relationships and taxonomic status of these species require further investigation.

Conclusions
According to molecular phylogenetic tree and genetic distance, chromosome, and morphology analyses, we found that N. sacer should be considered as a distinct species rather than as a subspecies of N. confucianus or N. bukit. Is speciation from N. confucianus should be further examined. Niviventer sacer is distributed in the mountains and hills throughout Shandong. Niviventer confucianus is also distributed in Shandong, but its distribution is limited to the Southwest mountain areas, which are sympatry of N. sacer and N. confucianus. The genetic distance (K2P) between these groups is more than 5%, and karyotype and morphology analysis showed significant differences. Thus, it is likely that no hybridization occurs between these species. This study clarifies the taxonomic status of species, thereby enriching biodiversity and improving the species determination of small mammals in China.

Supplementary material 2
Figure S1-S7, Tables S2-S6. Partial morphological and molecular results Authors: Yaoyao Li, Yiqiao Li, Haotian Li, Jing Wang, Xiaoxiao Rong, Yuchun Li Data type: morphological and molecular data Explanation note: Figure S1. Landmark (•, red) and semi-landmark (▲, blue) locations in this study (M11107); the scale is 0.5 cm. Figure S2. Phylogenetic analyses of Cytb gene from all haplotypes by Bayesian Inference. Figure S3. Phylogenetic analyses of Cytb gene from all haplotypes by neighbor-joining. Figure S4. Results of automatic barcode gap discovery (ABGD) analyses. a: Histogram of genetic distance and frequency; b: Line diagram of genetic distance and total number. Figure S5. Cluster analysis based on external and skull morphological indices of N. confucianus, N. sacer, and N. lotipes. Figure S6. Superimposition of dorsal view (a), ventral view (b), lateral view of skull (c), and lateral view of mandible (d) of Niviventer confucianus. Figure S7. Comparison of the tail of N. confucianus (A), N. sacer (B), N. lotipes (C). Table S2. Results of automatic barcode gap discovery (ABGD) analyses.