Author: Rich Glor Page 7 of 13

I’ve credited the fourth king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy – Albert Schwartz – with describing eight Greater Antillean anole species.  The period during which Schwartz’s career overlapped with Williams’s and that of the fifth yet-t0-be-revealed king were the glory years of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy.  Over a little more than a decade in the late 1960s through the 1970s, these three figures described over 10 species, including some of the last new species discovered on Hispaniola and Jamaica.  The activities of these three key figures were highly synergistic; Schwartz and Williams often contributed to one another’s work and divvied up projects to mutual benefit (even though they never described an anole species together) and Schwartz was a junior coauthor with the fifth king on several species descriptions.

After graduating with a PhD from the University of Michigan, Schwartz spent the majority of his academic career at Miami Dade Community College, an institution known more for its massive enrollment than for its faculty’s contributions to systematics.  Early in his career, Schwartz worked primarily in Cuba, resulting in the description of three species, including two locally restricted species related to the Cuban crown-giant anole Anolis equestris (baracoae and smallwoodi) and a widespread trunk-ground species (jubar) that is the xeric forest counterpart to another widespread Cuban trunk-ground anole found primarily in mesic environments (homolechis).  Schwartz would later devote his attention to Hispaniola, ultimately describing five species from both Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  As was the case with Williams, many of the Hispaniola taxa that Schwartz described were unusual montane endemics (rimarum, fowleri, sheplani, and eugenegrahami).

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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.

I previously introduced my mission to recognize the five anole systematists responsible for describing the majority of the anole species found in the Greater Antilles.  The first king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy was the prolific E. D. Cope.  Cope was the last in a line of authors who described anole species that he’d never actually spent time with in the field (see also Duméril and Bibron).  The next king on my list, by contrast, was an avid field biologist and conducted field work in the West Indies throughout his career.

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