A new species of Cristaria Schumacher, 1817 (Bivalvia, Unionidae) from Sichuan, China

This dataset contains the digitized treatments in Plazi based on the original journal article Dai, Yu-Ting, Chen, Zhong-Guang, Chen, Hu, Niu, Bo-Wen, Jia, Ding-Chao, Xie, Tian-Xiang, Xiong, Liu-Feng, Wu, Xiao-Ping, Peng, Mo (2026): A new species of Cristaria Schumacher, 1817 (Bivalvia, Unionidae) from Sichuan, China. Zoosystematics and Evolution 102 (1): 87-95, DOI: 10.3897/zse.102.173182AbstractThe species diversity of freshwater mussels in the upper Yangtze River has been seriously underestimated, and human-induced disturbances have severely threatened the survival of local bivalve species. In this study, we describe a new freshwater mussel species, Cristaria wangyucheni Z. - G. Chen & Y. - T. Dai, sp. nov., from the Jialing River Basin in the upper Yangtze River, Sichuan, China, based on comparative morphology and molecular phylogeny. Phylogenetic analyses of COI and 28 S rRNA gene fragments revealed that C. wangyucheni sp. nov. is a sister to the other species of Cristaria. The pairwise uncorrected COI p - distance analysis demonstrated genetic distances ranging from 10.10 % (between this species and C. truncata) to 13.17 % (between this species and C. “ beirensis ”). Morphologically, C. wangyucheni sp. nov. can be distinguished from its congeners by its medium-sized shell, which ranges from an elongated triangle to an irregular rectangle. This discovery broadens our understanding of interspecific shell morphological variation within the genus Cristaria.