Reassessing a Holocene extinction: multiple lines of evidence do not support the historical presence and recent extirpation of a protected anole on the island of Anguilla

Accurate assessment of historical species ranges is important for
conservation science and management. Inaccurate historical species ranges
can lead to incorrect assumptions about local extinctions, population
trends, and potential sites for reintroductions. Yet, historical knowledge
is often lacking for many species. Here, we present body size data on the
case of the bearded anole, Anolis pogus, which is long believed
to have been recently extirpated from the island of Anguilla. Body size
data consists of snout-vent length for adult male and female Anolis pogus,
A. schwartzi, and A. gingivinus. These data were generated from a mix of
field measurements and samples from natural history collections. We then
compared these data with the size distributions of anole fossils found on
the island of Anguilla. We show that rather than a two-species community,
the fossil size data better corresponds to sexual dimorphism in a
single-species community consisting only of A. gingivinus. Thus, fossil
data do not support the historical presence of A. pogus as
previously suggested. We also generated WGS libraries from archival
samples of Anolis pogus allegedly collected on Anguilla.
We show that all of these museum samples are actually A.
schwartzi and originated from a nearby island, St. Eustatius.
Thus, there are no existing collections of A. pogus from the
island of Anguilla. Scripts for analyzing these genomic data are archived
on Zenodo. Raw sequence data are hosted on NCBI's SRA
database.