You can access the report here.
Previous Anole Annals posts on A. roosevelti–some guaranteed interesting!–can be found here.
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
Latest posts by Jonathan Losos (see all)
- Third Mexican Amber Anolis Lizard Discovered - January 14, 2025
- Anolis Lizard Research Paves the Way for Advances in Treatment of Human Prostate Cancer - January 10, 2025
- When Two Lizards Meet for the First Time, Scientists Witness Evolution in Action - January 3, 2025
Liam Revell
It’s an interesting report. Thanks for sharing. Meanwhile I’ll still hold out hope that Anolis roosevelti is out there somewhere!
I would disagree with the report authors’ interpretation of our 2015 (primarily methodological paper): “In 2015, Revell et al. published a study that investigated the phylogenetic position of Anolis roosevelti using the species’ morphological characteristics and evolutionary correlations with extant species. Anolis roosevelti was placed in the phylogenetic tree of Greater Antillean Anolis lizards, finding that A. roosevelti is a sister lineage to A. equestris, a clade of morphologically and ecologically similar species commonly known as the Cuban crown‐giant anole, which is currently found in Cuba.”
This statement is prima facie wrong — simply because no phylogenetic study ever finds that taxon [a] **IS** sister to taxon [b]: only that the preponderance of evidence indicates one relationship or another.
In addition, however, in our study (based on morphological data for continuous characters — hardly the gold standard of evidence) we found that the most likely placement of roosevelti was near equestris — but neither could we reject (P = 0.26!) the more parsimonious hypothesis of roosevelti as sister lineage to cuvieri.
No doubt this is our fault for failing to properly communicate the implications of our analysis! I didn’t imagine it would one day end up in a government, species-status report.