As the summer is ending and a new semester is beginning, your thoughts may have returned to teaching. I try to use a diversity of taxonomic groups in my lectures and labs, but of course, I find anoles to be useful examples for many topics in the classroom. In my Evolution course, taught each year to biology majors at Trinity University, I focus one laboratory module on anole evolution to teach my students to conduct phylogenetically-informed comparative analyses. Below, I’ll describe the approach I use in my course, and if you would like to see my materials, or adapt them for your own teaching, I’d be happy to share the lab handouts – just email me at michele.johnson[at]trinity.edu.
Many activities in my lecture and lab focus on creating and interpreting phylogenies, and one of my earliest lab sessions teaches students to use parsimony and similarity-based classification to build phylogenies from mammalian morphological traits.