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Edited by David M. Hillis, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, and approved June 19, 2015 (received for review April 1, 2015)
Significance
An unresolved question in ecology is whether the structure of ecological communities can be stable over very long timescales. Here we describe a wealth of new amber fossils for an ancient radiation of Hispaniolan lizards that, until now, has had a very poor fossil record. These fossils provide an important and previously unavailable perspective on an ecologically well-studied group and indicate that anole lizard communities occurring on Hispaniola 20 Mya were made up of the same types of habitat specialists present in this group today. These data indicate that the ecological processes important in extant anole communities have been operative over long periods of time.
Abstract
Whether the structure of ecological communities can exhibit stability over macroevolutionary timescales has long been debated. The similarity of independently evolved Anolis lizard communities on environmentally similar Greater Antillean islands supports the notion that community evolution is deterministic. However, a dearth of Caribbean Anolis fossils—only three have been described to date—has precluded direct investigation of the stability of anole communities through time. Here we report on an additional 17 fossil anoles in Dominican amber dating to 15–20 My before the present. Using data collected primarily by X-ray microcomputed tomography (X-ray micro-CT), we demonstrate that the main elements of Hispaniolan anole ecomorphological diversity were in place in the Miocene. Phylogenetic analysis yields results consistent with the hypothesis that the ecomorphs that evolved in the Miocene are members of the same ecomorph clades extant today. The primary axes of ecomorphological diversity in the Hispaniolan anole fauna appear to have changed little between the Miocene and the present, providing evidence for the stability of ecological communities over macroevolutionary timescales.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: emma.sherratt{at}gmail.com.
↵2Present address: Sección Genética, Departamento de Biología, Universidad del Valle, A.A. 25360 Cali, Valle del Cauca, Colombia.
↵3Present address: Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3B2, Canada.
4K.d.Q. and J.B.L. contributed equally to this work.
Author contributions: E.S., K.d.Q., and J.B.L. designed research; E.S., M.d.R.C., R.J.G., D.L.M., K.d.Q., and J.B.L. performed research; T.J.S. and A.H. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; E.S., M.d.R.C., R.J.G., and D.L.M. analyzed data; and E.S., M.d.R.C., R.J.G., D.L.M., T.J.S., K.d.Q., and J.B.L. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: Raw morphometric and phylogenetic data and high-resolution images of the fossils have been archived in Zenodo, https://zenodo.org/record/17442 (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.17442).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1506516112/-/DCSupplemental.
Deep time stability of lizard communities
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