Testing the island effect on phenotypic diversification: insights from the Hemidactylus geckos of the Socotra Archipelago.

ABSTRACT: Island colonization is often assumed to trigger extreme levels of phenotypic diversification. Yet, empirical evidence suggests that it does not always so. In this study we test this hypothesis using a completely sampled mainland-island system, the arid clade of Hemidactylus, a group of geckos mainly distributed across Africa, Arabia and the Socotra Archipelago. To such purpose, we generated a new molecular phylogeny of the group on which we mapped body size and head proportions. We then explored whether island and continental taxa shared the same morphospace and differed in their disparities and tempos of evolution. Insular species produced the most extreme sizes of the radiation, involving accelerated rates of evolution and higher disparities compared with most (but not all) of the contin

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Porta J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4829864 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature