Traits of lizards of the world: Variation around a successful evolutionary design

By Shai Meiri. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2018

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Lizards form a remarkable radiation of land vertebrates. The basic tetrapod design, of a four‐legged sprawling‐postured ectothermic animal, has been highly successful ever since vertebrates first moved to land. Together with the amniote adaptations for fully terrestrial lives it has set crown group squamates on a path to ecological and evolutionary success since they evolved over 200 million years ago (Evans, 2003; Zheng & Wiens, 2016). Over this time period lizards have diversified into all terrestrial habitats except the coldest ones (but see Berman, Bulakhova, Alfimov, & Meshcheryakova, 2016), filling multiple ecological niches, and showing a remarkable array of adaptations. Lizards have repeatedly evolved legless forms (e.g., Brandley, Huelsenbeck, & Wiens, 2008; Gans, 1975), including the hugely successful and highly derived, group of snakes ‐ comprising over a third of the total diversity of squamates (Uetz, 2018). Even without snakes, over 6,650 species of lizards (here including the amphisbaenians) are nowadays recognized (Uetz, 2018), and about 120 new forms are added to the list yearly (Meiri, 2016). This makes lizards more species rich than all of the Mammalia (6,369 species, with 83 species on average, added per year since 2005; Burgin, Colella, Kahn, & Upham, 2018). This extraordinary radiation has made lizards a highly studied model system for evolutionary (e.g., Gamble, Greenbaum, Jackman, Russell, & Bauer, 2016; Losos, 2009; Losos, Jackman, Larson, Queiroz, & Rodriguez‐Schettino, 2009; Rabosky, Donnellan, Talaba, Received: 21 June 2017 | Revised: 13 May 2018 | Accepted: 22 May 2018 DOI: 10.1111/geb.12773

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b50e429fb1a84b221a1ca8806493a8e0f0b566e8

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

1. Shai Meiri
2. D. G. Chapple
3. D. Pincheira‐Donoso
4. Tim Newbold
5. A. Etard
6. Sophie Morrill
7. M. Ribeiro‐Júnior
8. A. Bauer

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. Shai Meiri
2. Tim Newbold
3. A. Etard
4. Sophie Morrill
5. A. Slavenko
6. D. G. Chapple
7. D. Pincheira‐Donoso
8. O. Torres‐Carvajal

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Shai Meiri
2. D. Pincheira‐Donoso
3. D. G. Chapple
4. I. Das
5. O. Torres‐Carvajal
6. A. Bauer
7. Tim Newbold
8. A. Etard

Citations in the corpus

• Global gaps in trait data for terrestrial vertebrates (2020, methodology): “We extracted, where possible, the accepted names of species from either the Red List or the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS). from Meiri (2018) to flag such species.”
• The global diversity and distribution of lizard clutch sizes (2020, background): “Among squamates (lizards and snakes), clutch sizes vary across two orders of magnitude, from 1 to over 100 eggs in some large snakes (Reed & Rodda, 2009; Vitt & Caldwell, 2013) and to over 90 eggs in some chameleons (Meiri, 2018; Tilbury, 2010; Zug, 2013).”