Molecular phylogeny of the genus Helix (Pulmonata: Helicidae)

The vast diversity of land snail forms is insufficiently understood even in seemingly familiar taxa. This holds for Helix Linnaeus, 1758, a genus with several common edible species which comprises the largest Western Palearctic snails. The taxonomy of this genus, which has a centre of diversity in the eastern Mediterranean, has recently undergone significant changes, in both the delimitation of the genus itself and its species‐level systematics. Here, we compare the lineage diversity of Helix, as revealed by two mitochondrial markers, with the conclusions of the recently published morphology‐based taxonomic revision. For the molecular analysis, we assembled a representative data set covering almost all species of the genus as recognized by the mentioned revision. We obtained sequences not only from fresh and preserved soft tissues but also from dried tissue remains (some of them decades old) from shell collections. Our results show that the genus Helix, in the narrow sense proposed by recent studies, is paraphyletic because the genus Tacheopsis was unambiguously revealed as one of the tip branches of Helix. The monophyly of several species, as presently recognized, was not supported; partly, this may be attributed to a lineage diversity overlooked so far. This holds also for the type species of the genus, H. pomatia, which comprises at least one additional lineage. Greece, the Aegean and western Turkey is the core area for the diversity of Helix and its relatives, and the region is probably a major long‐term refuge for large Helicidae. The highest species diversity is found along the Alpide belt from the western Balkans to southern Turkey. The diversity of Helix in Europe, north of Greece and the Apennines, is a result of a single European radiation. Our data also suggest that past human activities likely influenced the present‐day distributions of some species.