100 Years after Camp's classification of Geckos

DAZA, JUAN D.; BAUER, AARON M.; ARIAS, J. SALVADOR

New York

Simposio; Camp '23: Celebrating 100 Years of Charles L. Camp "Classification of the Lizards"; 2023

American Museum of Natural History

A century ago, Charles L. Camp classified geckos in the section Gekkota, within which he included three families, Gekkonidae, Uroplatidae, and Ardeosauridae. He places pygopods in a clade formed by mainly anguimorph lizards, considering them a unique family of limbless lizards from the Australian-New Guinean-Tasmanian region. The earliest link of geckos and pygopods was made by Shute and Bellairs in 1953, using the shared morphology of the cochlear neural limbus. In 1954 Underwood placed pygopods and geckos together (but also with dibamids). In 1956 McDowell and Bogert removed pygopods from Anguimorpha and commented their similarities with geckos based on morphological characters form the skull, vertebral column, eye, tongue, and post-cloacal sacs. Pygopods have been interpreted as the sister group of geckos or allied to the Diplodactylidae and Carphodactylidae. Today the dominant hypothesis of relationships classifies geckos into seven families and two major clades, the Pygopodomorpha (Pygopodidae, Carphodactylidae, and Diplodactylidae) and Gekkomorpha (Eublepharidae, Sphaerodactylidae, Pyllodactylidae, and Gekkonidae). The latest phylogenomic analysis placed Eublepharidae at the base of the crown group Gekkota. In terms of the fossil record, Ardeosaurus is outside Gekkota, a name noe restricted to extant group, while Pangekkota includes a series of stem groups including Eichstaettisaurus, Norellius, Hoburogekko, Gobekko, and several undescribed Mid-Cretaceous lizards in amber from Myanmar. Although the molecular scaffold for the crown group is well supported, and some families are well supported by morphological data (e.g. Eublepharidae, Pygopodidae), there are still many families that are not adequately characterized by morphological characters. Using a combined morphological and molecular dataset, we identified characters that support some of the remaining families.