From Nicholson et al. (2018)
Anole Annals has dropped the ball on staying current with recent papers about the systematics and taxonomy of anoles. So, here are two highlights over the last two years.
Last year, Steve Poe and 10 co-authors from five countries published a phylogeny including all species of anoles based on all available data. It was a tour de force and the paper was far-ranging, discussing the many implications of their phylogeny for anole evolution, biogeography and other topics. Among other topics, the paper sank a number of anole species, presented a phylogenetic taxonomy of anoles and argued that this taxonomy solves the problems posed in the debate on generic classification of anoles in the traditional Linnean taxonomic framework.
Here’s the abstract from that paper, published in Systematic Biology:
Anolis lizards (anoles) are textbook study organisms in evolution and ecology. Although several topics in evolutionary biology have been elucidated by the study of anoles, progress in some areas has been hampered by limited phylogenetic information on this group. Here, we present a phylogenetic analysis of all 379 extant species of Anolis, with new phylogenetic data for 139 species including new DNA data for 101 species. We use the resulting estimates as a basis for defining anole clade names under the principles of phylogenetic nomenclature and to examine the biogeographic history of anoles. Our new taxonomic treatment achieves the supposed advantages of recent subdivisions of anoles that employed ranked Linnaean-based nomenclature while avoiding the pitfalls of those approaches regarding artificial constraints imposed by ranks. Our biogeographic analyses demonstrate complexity in the dispersal history of anoles, including multiple crossings of the Isthmus of Panama, two invasions of the Caribbean, single invasions to Jamaica and Cuba, and a single evolutionary dispersal from the Caribbean to the mainland that resulted in substantial anole diversity. Our comprehensive phylogenetic estimate of anoles should prove useful for rigorous testing of many comparative evolutionary hypotheses.
This year in Zootaxa, Nicholson, Crother, Guyer and Savage published a paper following on Poe et al.’s. The paper does not have an abstract, but the title says it all: “Translating a clade based classification into one that is valid under the international code of zoological nomenclature: the case of the lizards of the family Dactyloidae (Order Squamata).” In short, the article argues that the traditional Linnean classification system is not going away any time soon, and that the clades recognized by Poe et al. are easily translatable into genera in the traditional system, as revealed in the figure above.
In a post just published, an administrator for Wikispecies asks if they should follow this proposed reclassification of anoles. If you have comments, please make them on that post.
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David Wake
A simple, legal way to use Anolis for all but Dactyloa is to treat the other generic nomina as subgenera of Anolis, which has priority. Otherwise follow Nicholson et al. (both options give you equally valid Linnean taxonomy).