Following Barbour’s work, nearly a quarter century would pass before another Harvard man picked up the mantle of describing new anoles. Among his many other contributions, Ernest Williams named 12 species of anoles from Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola between 1959 and 1975. By the time Williams came along, most of the abundant and widely-distributed anoles had already been described. Many of the species Williams described are montane endemics (A. reconditus, A. christophei, A. etheridgei, A. dolicocephalus, A. occultus, A. singularis, A. insolitus) that might have been more difficult to access during previous generations of herpetological exploration in the West Indies. The last Greater Antillean species he described – Anolis marcanoi – was among the first “cryptic” anole species to be recognized with the aid of molecular markers. Even after his work describing new Greater Antillean anoles came to an end, Williams continued to describe new species of anoles from the mainland through the 1980s. In his last publication in 1999 (published after his death in 1998), Williams called an end to the era of discovery in anoles. For more on Williams, you can read the memorial published in the Harvard Gazette in 2009 by A. W. Crompton, Karel Liem and Jonathan Losos.
- JMIH 2014: Early Records of Fossil Anolis from the Oligocene and Miocene of Florida, USA - August 13, 2014
- JMIH 2014: Relative Contribution of Genetic and Ecological Factors to Morphological Differentiation in Island Populations of Anolis sagrei - August 7, 2014
- JMIH 2014: The Ultrastructure of Spermatid Development within the Anole, Anolis sagrei - August 5, 2014
jonathanlosos
Another in a series of fascinating posts on the kings of Caribbean anole description. Glor is incorrect, however, on one point. After a 10 year hiatus in publication, Williams again posthumously published a paper in 2009, the description of two South American species.
Richard Glor
Does anybody even care about mainland species? All of the really interesting anoles live in the Greater Antilles:)
geneva
Poe’s reasons for including Williams and Miyata are clear and well founded, but I wonder how far one could take posthumous co-authorship. What’s stopping me from including Darwin as a co-author on my next manuscript?