Cryptic, Sympatric Diversity in Tegu Lizards of the Tupinambis teguixin Group (Squamata, Sauria, Teiidae) and the Description of Three New Species.

Tegus of the genera Tupinambis and Salvator are the largest Neotropical lizards and the most exploited clade of Neotropical reptiles. For three decades more than 34 million tegu skins were in trade, about 1.02 million per year.

Methodological congruence in phylogenomic analyses with morphological support for teiid lizards (Sauria: Teiidae).

A well-known issue in phylogenetics is discordance among gene trees, species trees, morphology, and other data types. Gene-tree discordance is often caused by incomplete lineage sorting, lateral gene transfer, and gene duplication. Multispecies-coalescent methods can account for incomplete lineage sorting and are believed by many to be more accurate than concatenation.

Effectiveness of phylogenomic data and coalescent species-tree methods for resolving difficult nodes in the phylogeny of advanced snakes (Serpentes: Caenophidia).

Next-generation genomic sequencing promises to quickly and cheaply resolve remaining contentious nodes in the Tree of Life, and facilitates species-tree estimation while taking into account stochastic genealogical discordance among loci. Recent methods for estimating species trees bypass full likelihood-based estimates of the multi-species coalescent, and approximate the true species-tree using simpler summary metrics. These methods converge on the true species-tree with sufficient genomic sampling, even in the anomaly zone.

Phylogeography of the widespread African puff adder (Bitis arietans) reveals multiple Pleistocene refugia in southern Africa.

Evidence from numerous Pan-African savannah mammals indicates that open-habitat refugia existed in Africa during the Pleistocene, isolated by expanding tropical forests during warm and humid interglacial periods. However, comparative data from other taxonomic groups are currently lacking. We present a phylogeographic investigation of the African puff adder (Bitis arietans), a snake that occurs in open-habitat formations throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Genus-level phylogeny of snakes reveals the origins of species richness in Sri Lanka.

Snake diversity in the island of Sri Lanka is extremely high, hosting at least 89 inland (i.e., non-marine) snake species, of which at least 49 are endemic.