Phylogenomics at the tips: inferring lineages and their demographic history in a tropical lizard, Carlia amax

High-throughput sequencing approaches offer opportunities to better understand the evolutionary processes driving diversification, particularly in nonmodel organisms. In particular, the 100–1000's of loci that can now be sequenced are providing unprecedented power in population, speciation and phylogenetic studies. Here, we apply an exon capture approach to generate >99% complete sequence and SNP data across >2000 loci from a tropical skink, Carlia amax, and exploit these data to identify divergent lineages and infer their relationships and demographic histories. This is especially relevant to low-dispersal tropical taxa that often have cryptic diversity and spatially dynamic histories. For C. amax, clustering of nuclear SNPs and coalescent-based species delimitation analyses identify four divergent lineages, one fewer than predicted based on geographically coherent mtDNA clades (>9.4% sequence divergence). Three of these lineages are widespread and parapatric on the mainland, ...