A phylogenomic perspective on the biogeography of skinks in the Plestiodon brevirostris group inferred from target enrichment of ultraconserved elements

Aim: The aim of our study was to reconstruct ancestral geographic distributions from time-calibrated phylogenies generated from phylogenomic data to answer three broad questions about the biogeography of skinks in the Plestiodon brevirostris group: (1) Are biogeographic patterns correlated with the formation of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt? (2) Do different methods of phylogenetic estimation result in different topologies? If so, (3) are biogeographic reconstructions impacted by the use of different phylogenetic trees? Location: Mexico. Methods: We used target enrichment of ultraconserved elements (UCEs) to obtain sequence data from 58 skinks representing 11 of the 13 described species in the group. We estimated time-calibrated phylogenies using concatenated and multispecies coalescent phylogenetic approaches. We used these phylogenies to reconstruct ancestral geographic distributions. Results: The final dataset contained 3,282 UCEs from each skink. Samples of each putative specie...