Placing cryptic, recently extinct, or hypothesized taxa into an ultrametric phylogeny using continuous character data: A case study with the lizard Anolis roosevelti

In recent years, enormous effort and investment has been put into assembling the tree of life: a phylogenetic history for all species on Earth. Overwhelmingly, this progress toward building an ever increasingly complete phylogeny of living things has been accomplished through sophisticated analysis of molecular data. In the modern genomic age, molecular genetic data have become very easy and inexpensive to obtain for many species. However, some lineages are poorly represented in or absent from tissue collections, or are unavailable for molecular analysis for other reasons such as restrictive biological sample export laws. Other species went extinct recently and are only available in formalin museum preparations or perhaps even as sub-fossils. In this brief communication we present a new method for placing cryptic, recently extinct, or hypothesized taxa into an ultrametric phylogeny of extant taxa using continuous character data. This method is based on a relatively simple modification o...