Spiny Tails and Clades: A Fully Sampled Phylogeny of Hoplocercine Lizards (Iguanidae/ Hoplocercinae) and its Taxonomic and Nomenclatural Implications

Abstract

Hoplocercine lizards (Enyalioides, Morunasaurus, and Hoplocercus) form a clade of ca. 20 currently recognized species. The phylogenetic relationships among hoplocercine lizards, whose members exhibit striking differences in morphology (e.g., spiny vs. non-spiny tails), have not been clearly resolved by previous molecular phylogenetic studies. We generated a considerably larger dataset including 130 new DNA sequences from one mitochondrial and four nuclear loci for all named and two unnamed species of Hoplocercinae. We analyzed the data under concatenated maximum likelihood (RAxML) and Bayesian (MrBayes) as well as summary coalescent (ASTRAL) approaches. While our phylogenetic hypotheses strongly supported the monophyly of Hoplocercinae, neither Enyalioides nor Morunasaurus was supported as monophyletic. Instead, M. groi was inferred with strong support to form a clade with E. heterolepis and E. laticeps. This clade was in turn the sister taxon to other species of Morunasaurus (M. annularis, M. peruvianus). The remaining species of Enyalioides formed a separate clade with a basal split between western (3 species) and eastern (13 species) subclades. Tree topology tests rejected the monophyly of Enyalioides but failed to reject monophyly of Morunasaurus, suggesting that further study is needed to resolve its taxonomic status. Based on our results, we establish the converted clade names Hoplocercinae, Hoplocercus, Enyalioides, and Morunasaurus, as well as the new clade name Zimiamviasaurus.

Two new species of wood lizards (Hoplocercinae: Enyalioides) from Cordillera de Colán in north-eastern Peru

“…The taxonomic conclusions of this study are based on the observation of morphological features and colour patterns, genetic distances, and the phylogenetic tree recently presented by Torres-Carvajal et al (2023). This information is considered species delimitation criteria following a general lineage or unified species concept (de Queiroz 1998, 2007).…”

“…Sample CORBIDI 21351, which corresponds to one of the new species described below, was excluded from this analysis as it had a high percentage of missing data (34.2%). GenBank accession numbers are listed in Table 2 of Torres-Carvajal et al (2023).…”

“…Among squamatan reptiles, the clade Hoplocercinae includes 20 currently recognized species of Neotropical iguanian lizards assigned to two genera: Enyalioides Boulenger, 1885 and Hoplocercus Fitzinger, 1843 (Torres-Carvajal et al 2023). Among these, wood lizards and manticores ( Enyalioides ) occupy lowland tropical rainforests, including the Chocó and the western Amazon basin, with fourteen species (74%) occurring east of the Andes and five (26%) west of the Andes.…”

“…These discoveries are primarily the result of recent fieldwork in poorly explored areas of the Central and Northern Andes of Peru and Ecuador. In this paper, we describe two new species of Enyalioides from Cordillera de Colán based on morphological and phylogenetic evidence (Torres-Carvajal et al 2023).…”

Introducing the Bulletin of Phylogenetic Nomenclature

“…The second article, by Torres-Carvajal et al (2023), presents a revised inference concerning the phylogeny of hoplocercine lizards from an expanded dataset and establishes names for several of the inferred clades. Two of the authors of this article had previously published phylogenetic definitions for most of those names (Torres-Carvajal and de Queiroz 2009; Torres-Carvajal et al 2011), but those definitions were published prior to the starting date of the PhyloCode, so the authors now formally establish the names.…”