Tony Gamble

TL;DR: The results provide the first analysis of the global conservation status and distribution patterns of reptiles and the threats affecting them, highlighting conservation priorities and knowledge gaps which need to be addressed urgently to ensure the continued survival of the world’s reptiles.

TL;DR: A precipitous drop in costs and increase in sequencing efficiency is anticipated, with concomitant development of improved annotation technology, and it is proposed to create a collection of tissue and DNA specimens for 10,000 vertebrate species specifically designated for whole-genome sequencing in the very near future.

TL;DR: A multigene phylogeny of geckos is presented, including 107 of 118 recognized genera, and it is determined that adhesive toepads have been gained and lost multiple times, and remarkably, with approximately equal frequency.

TL;DR: Support is found for the hypothesis that sex chromosome systems can readily become trap-like and it is found that adding even a small number of species from understudied clades can greatly enhance hypothesis testing in a model-based phylogenetic framework.

TL;DR: A phylogeny of the sphaerodactyl geckos and their closest relatives is generated and divergence date estimates are used to inform a biogeographical scenario regarding Gondwanan relationships and assess the roles of vicariance and dispersal in shaping the current distributions of the New World sphaingroup gecko and their nearest Old World relatives.