The evolutionary history of dragon lizards (Squamata: Agamidae) revealed by phylogenomics

Dragon lizards (Squamata: Agamidae) are a species-rich, ecologically and morphologically diverse group that is broadly distributed across the eastern hemisphere. Here, we present a phylogenomic study of this major clade of lizards to elucidate their biogeographic history, understand how dispersal and vicariance generated modern species distributions, and examine whether ecological opportunities encountered during agamid evolutionary history shaped speciation rates. We generated genome-wide sequence data for 42 species representing 40 genera to infer the evolutionary relationships and timescale of dragon lizards. The phylogeny was largely concordant across several different types of genetic loci, but rapidly evolving long exons had better support values across gene and species trees compared to other datasets. We also inferred a supermatrix tree and timetree for 433 (72% of described species) species to perform taxonomically well-sampled biogeographic and macroevolutionary analyses. Thes..., , # Data from: The evolutionary history of dragon lizards (Squamata: Agamidae) revealed by phylogenomics

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https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ngf1vhj62]
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**Corresponding author information**

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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]
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**Funding information**

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

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Scarpetta SG, Karin BR, Corl A, McGuire JA. The evolutionary history of dragon lizards (Squamata: Agamidae) revealed by phylogenomics. 2025. Systematic Biology.
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https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syaf088
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#### **Dataset overview**

This dataset includes all files to reproduce the results from Scarpetta et al. 2025. This includes supplemental figures, multiple sequence align...,