Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji

Founder-event speciation can occur when one or more organisms colonize a distant, unoccupied area via long-distance dispersal, leading to the evolution of a new species lineage. Species radiations established by long-distance, and especially transoceanic, dispersal can cause substantial shifts in regional biodiversity. Here, we investigate the occurrence and timing of the greatest known long-distance oceanic dispersal event in the history of terrestrial vertebrates—the rafting of iguanas from North America to Fiji. Iguanas are large-bodied herbivores that are well-known overwater dispersers, including species that colonized the Caribbean and the Galápagos islands. However, the origin of Fijian iguanas had not been comprehensively tested. We estimated the phylogenetic rela- tionships and evolutionary timescale of the iguanid lizard radiation using genome-wide exons and ultraconserved elements (UCEs). Those data indicate that the closest living relative of extant Fijian iguanas is the..., This dataset includes all files to reproduce the results from Scarpetta et al. 2025. This includes multiple sequence alignments, biogeographic analysis files, species-tree and divergence time analysis files, and resulting treefiles. The dataset also includes a baits file for target sequence capture, a file of the targets, and a spreadsheet of distance data used to create Figure 4 in the main text., , # Data from: Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji

\[[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4tmpg4fjr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4tmpg4fjr)]

**Corresponding author information**

```
Name: Simon Scarpetta
ORCID: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0003-0976-9337
Affiliation: Department of Environmental Science, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California
email: [e-mail]
alternate email: [e-mail]
```

**Funding information**

```
This work was funded by an NSF postdoctoral research fellowship in Biology to SGS (DBI # 2109461).
```

**Related publication**

```
Scarpetta SG, Fisher RN, Karin BR, Niukula J, Corl A, Jackman TR, McGuire JA. Iguanas rafted more than 8000 km from North America to Fiji. 2025. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
```

```
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2318622122
```

**Dataset overview**

This dataset includes all files to reproduce the results from Scarpetta et ...,