CAnolis is a freely downloadable visualization app for learning about Caribbean anole evolution, built using the Processing programming language. Its main purpose is to help teachers of evolution explain convergence and adaptive radiation to high school
and college students. It does so by allowing viewers to click on an island and see where on the phylogeny species in different ecomorphs occur.

Fernando Racimo, creator of the App, explains how it came to be: “The inspiration for the program came after taking a Herpetology class at Harvard, but I didn’t have the means to create it until a friend introduced me to a visually-oriented Java-based programming
language called Processing. I obtained the list of anoles and the clade phylogeny from Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree, while the ecomorph drawings came from a classroom exercise available at the University of California Museum of Paleontology’s website and mentioned earlier in the Anole Annals. My objective was to link island distribution,
phylogenetic placement and ecological adaptation into a single interactive program that made it easy for users to understand how different species of anoles evolved in each island. Jonathan Losos, Mickey Eagleson and Sami Majadla kindly provided advice on how best to display the information.”

The App can be downloaded here:

CAnolis for Mac: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17593686/CAnolis%20for%20Mac.zip

CAnolis for Windows: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17593686/CAnolis%20for%20Windows.zip

Please email fernandoracimo@gmail.com if you have any comments or suggestions for improvements.

Jonathan Losos
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