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Geoemydid turtles are one of the most imperilled fauna on the planet, with nearly half of them are threatened with extinction due to bushmeat crisis, traditional medicine, and the illegal pet trade. Classical taxonomy often fails to identify the pet-kept turtle specimens due to amorphous form, unusual shell colouration owing to poor storage in captivity or intensely tinted for high demanding value. The DNA barcoding technique has evidenced as a supportive tool for accurate species identification in systematics research and discerned the nameless taxa in forensic sciences. We tested the effectiveness of DNA barcoding tools for identifying the pet-kept Geoemydid turtle in northeast India. The 36 generated sequences are readily delineated into 12 Geoemydid species using molecular data. The overall mean genetic distance of the studied Geoemydid turtles dataset is 15.3% and ranges from 3.4% to 22.6% between the species. The NJ, ML and Bayesian phylogeny also resulted monophyletic clustering and discriminated all the studied species. The present study contributes DNA barcode sequences of Geoemydid turtles in the global database and also affirms the on-going illegal pet trade of highly threatened species in northeast India., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© 2018 Zoological Survey of India. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)

Anecdotal reports indicate the allopatric populations of two Manouria emys subspecies differ in colour variation and plastron pattern, intimating that these may constitute separate evolutionary lineages. We examined the studied taxa both morphologically and genetically to determine the described morphological differences correlated with genetic divergence. Based on the plastron pattern, the study detected three morphologically different M. emys having their footmarks in northeast India, bordering international boundaries of Bangladesh and Myanmar. Nevertheless, we found shallow genetic divergence in both mtCOI and mtCytb gene segment among the different M. emys morphospecies. This study concludes that the detected plastron anomalies in M. emys do not suggest their distinct genetic lineages., Competing Interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors., (© 2018 Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)