Comments on: Pink Iguanas and Disappearing Islands https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/ Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:14:31 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 By: Nick (Matzke) https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/#comment-529275 Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:14:31 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/#comment-529275 In the end, I’m not surprised by what the authors of this recent paper are surprised by. I would expect only a vague correspondence between island history and animal movement. The question that I would like to see addressed is this: Why are the basal iguanas rare and the derived iguanas more common?

My answer: chance! Prove me wrong…

(We could write a paper on this with a simuluation. Honestly… Actually I think there might be some kind of bias for islands retaining “relictual” “basal” lineages that are lost on the mainland…there are some famous examples…but no one has ever done a quantitative study to see if such a pattern would fall out of standard dispersal-speciation-extinction processes…)

]]> By: Jim Thomerson https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/#comment-529274 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:26:44 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/#comment-529274 I think I am reading that it is an undescribed (ie new) species which is the plesiomorphous sister group of the rest of the Galapagos iguanas.

]]> By: Virgil Samms https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/#comment-529273 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:15:08 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/06/pink-iguanas-and-disappearing/#comment-529273

is probably a new species that represents the basal (original) form of Galapagos land iguana.

So which is it: is it new, or is it the original?

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