Explanation of the background

The background to this blog is (many iterations of) a phylogenetic tree for 100 species of Caribbean Anolis lizards; specifically the phylogeny of Mahler et al. (2010). The colors mapped on the tree represent one stochastic character map of the famous Anolis ecomorphs. Note that not all Caribbean Anolis in this phylogeny belong to an ecomorph; these non-ecomorph species are plotted with dark orange branches. The circular tree was created with the wonderful program FigTree v1.3.1 (Rambaut 2009). The stochastic mapping was generated using the program SIMMAP v1.0 (Bollback et al. 2006).