Two new species of South Asian Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the southern tip of the Western Ghats, India

We describe two new small-bodied species of South Asian Cnemaspis from Kanyakumari District of Tamil Nadu State, India. The two new species are sister taxa, forming a well-supported, previously unsampled clade of South Asian Cnemaspis that we name the kanyakumariensis clade. This new clade is recovered with weak support as the sister taxon to the goaensis clade. Both the new species together can be easily distinguished from all other peninsular Indian clades by a combination of non-overlapping morphological characters such as small size with snout to vent length < 40 mm, femoral pores only present in males, presence of spine-like tubercles on flanks, and condition of the subcaudals. They can also be distinguished from each other by several characters such as the number of dorsal tubercles around the body, short vs long spine-like tubercles on flank, and the arrangement of keeled subcaudal scales. They also differ by uncorrected pairwise sequence divergence of 10.2 and 2.9% for ND2 and 16S, respectively. This work reveals that even the low-elevation coastal hills of southern India have ancient, endemic lineages and require protection.