> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 12:58:53 -0400
>
> Has this family/subfamily (depending how you go) always been monotypic
> (exclude the possibility that Aeluroscalabotes felinus multituberculatus was
> once a valid species)?
>
> Are there extinct Aeluroscalabotes species and/or extinct genera?
If you get a chance to visit a university library, read Grismer's paper
on the phylogeny of eublepharine geckos in:
Phylogenetic relationships of the lizard families : essays commemorating
Charles L. Camp / edited by Richard Estes and Gregory Pregill.
Stanford University Press, 1988.
LC Card no: 87021290
ISBN: 0804714355
Grismer constructs the phylogeny with Aeluroscalabotes branching off
first, then Coleonyx, then Goniurosaurus, then Eublepharis. He speculates
that the eublepharine geckos originated in what is now SE Asia, and the
ancestors of Coleonyx got to the Americas via Beringia, i.e. the land
bridge over what is now the Bering Straits between Siberia and Alaska.
During Tertiary times, before the Ice Ages, there were many periods when
the world's climate was much more uniform. A few million years ago,
most of Siberia and northern Canada, now tundra, were covered with redwood
(Sequoia) forest, and Antarctica was heavily forested with southern
beech (Nothofagus). So there were probably a lot of eublepharines over
an immense area of eastern Asia and North America, and likely quite a
few aeluroscalabotinae, too.
AFAIK, there aren't a whole lot of gecko fossils known. These are small
animals with delicate bones. Small vertebrates that die in a rainforest,
with high moisture and acidic soils, are seldom fossilized, even if they
aren't eaten and digested.
Another tidbit of biogeography, during the Ice Ages, southeast Asia and
most of Indonesia were one large landmass, called Sundaland by geologists.
The river valleys of Sundaland are now the straits between the islands,
which became inundated only about 12-15,000 years ago, so many animals
had ample opportunity to spread over what is now an archipelago.
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