Evolution and ecology of lizard body sizes

By Shai Meiri. 2008

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72fba558be9d6ee1ace2e475586a090f95c8ce6a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Body sizes and diversification rates of lizards, snakes, amphisbaenians and the tuatara (2016, background): “Bimodal size distributions (albeit usually with a higher mode at smaller sizes) have been detected in taxa as diverse as marsupials, hymenopterans, chameleons and placental mammals (Gardezi & da Silva, 1999; Ulrich, 2006; Meiri, 2008; Kelt & Meyer, 2009, respectively).”
Extinct, obscure or imaginary: The lizard species with the smallest ranges (2017, unknown): “It is important to interpret these findings cautiously given that, for example, the apparently small body size of most TL- species we list may be an artefact of the use of maxima to represent lizard sizes (Meiri, 2008).”
Length-weight allometries in lizards (2010, methodology): “size data are more often presented as maxima than as means (Meiri, 2008) and maxima are sensitive to sample size (Stamps & Andrews, 1992; Meiri, 2007).”
Is the island rule general? Turtles disagree (2014, background): “3b,c) contrasting with the commonly observed unimodal distribution of body sizes of animal clades (Hutchinson & MacArthur, 1959; Boback & Guyer, 2003; Meiri, 2008).”
Traits of lizards of the world: Variation around a successful evolutionary design (2018, background): “Mass equations – the best equation I have for converting the species (log10) SVL (in mm) into (log 10) mass (in grams; Feldman et al., 2016; Meiri, 2008).”
The island syndrome in lizards (2013, background): “many insular lizards show (Van Damme, 1999; Meiri, 2008), and”
Length–mass allometry in snakes (2013, background): “…accessibility to data has enhanced the compilation of size data for some of the major vertebrate taxa (Smith et al., 2003; Olden, Hogan & Zanden, 2007; Meiri, 2008; Olson et al., 2009), and these datasets have allowed us to search further for ecological and evolutionary processes involving size.”
Late Quaternary reptile extinctions: size matters, insularity dominates (2016, background): “Although extant large-bodied reptiles are purportedly more prone to extinction, this may have arisen due to a size bias in reptile assessments (Meiri, 2008).”
Sexual dimorphism of heads and abdomens: Different approaches to 'being large' in female and male lizards (2013, background): “This is a subset of the dataset reported in Meiri (2008) and Meiri et al. (2013).”
Fecundity Selection and the Evolution of Reproductive Output and Sex-Specific Body Size in the Liolaemus Lizard Adaptive Radiation (2011, background): “This variable is the standard proxy for body size in lizards (Meiri 2008), and has been shown to correlate with several life-history, ecological and morphological traits (Pough 1973; Peters 1983; Pough et al. 2004; Shine 2005).”
Biases in the current knowledge of threat status in lizards, and bridging the ‘assessment gap’ (2016, unknown): “We collected data on lizard traits from the literature, and in a few cases, in the field (see Meiri, 2008; Meiri et al., 2012, 2013, 2014; Scharf et al., 2015 for details).”
Slaying dragons: limited evidence for unusual body size evolution on islands (2011, background): “…explanation for insular gigantism in birds and reptiles (e.g. elephant birds, moas, Komodo dragons and the giant skinks of Cape Verde and New Caledonia) is that they have evolved large size on islands with no mammalian competitors or predators (Russell, 1877; Case, 1978; McNab, 2002; Meiri, 2008).”
Are lizards feeling the heat? A tale of ecology and evolution under two temperatures (2013, methodology): “Mass was calculated from maximum snout–vent length (SVL), the most common proxy for body size in lizards (Meiri, 2008), using equations developed by Pincheira-Donoso et al. (2011; for Liolaemidae), Novosolov et al. (2013; for different gecko families and for Anolis) and Meiri (2010; for all other…”