Novel island species elucidate a species complex of Neotropical Crocodiles

The evolutionary history of Neotropical crocodiles has remained elusive. They inhabit a broad geographic range with populations spanning from coastal, inland, and insular locations. Using a selection of natural insular, coastal, and one inland populations of C. acutus, coastal C. moreletii, and the single surviving population of C. rhombifer, we discovered a remarkable genetic diversity for the group. Moreover, geometric morphometric results of skull shapes shows that these crocodylus species span a morphological cline. We recovered a high genetic differentiation between C. moreletii, C. rhombifer, and five clusters of C. acutus. The genetic and geographic differences among the C. acutus clusters were used to suggest these may be a species complex.Several ecological, morphological, and genetic traits are identified in the well-studied population from Banco Chinchorro and Cozumel islands off the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula to support discrete species designations for these populations. Thi..., , , # Novel island species elucidate a species complex of Neotropical Crocodiles

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dbc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dbc)

We used Single digest Restriction site Associated DNA Sequencing (sRAD-Seq) (Baird *et al*., 2008) to generate Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) for genomic scans of crocodile populations from Mexico and Cuba.

## Description of the data and file structure

SNP's Data

* PopCrocodylus.vcf - This file inlcudes the SNP's obtained in this study and used for the analysis

- PopCrocodylusSNAPP.phy - This file has the SNP's used for running SNAPP with BEAST 2.0

* PopCrocodylusPLINK.bed - main input file for Admixture analysis

- PopCrocodylusPLINK.bim - binary marker information file for Admixture analysis

* PopCrocodylusPLINK.fam - pedigree stub file used to run the Admixture Analysis

- For the admixture analysis the .bed, .bim and .bam files have to be in the same directory

* COZ1BCH2_snps.txt - File use to run the demogr...,