Phylogenetic comparative methods whiz Liam Revell has developed a new method to visualize character evolution of continuous traits on a phylogeny. The program is cool and worth checking out on his Phytools blog, but the important point is that he illustrates the method by reconstructing size evolution in Greater Antillean anoles.
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
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Anthony Geneva
Very cool, Liam. I had been using TreeGradients to accomplish a similar effect, but having this function in R via phytools will be much more straight forward.
Liam Revell
Anthony. Cool. I had not seen TreeGradients, but I wondered if there might be other similar tools out there. Thanks for the heads up. phytools can also take a set of stochastic character mapped trees & plot the posterior density from the mappings (function densityMap; e.g., 1, 2). – Liam