Sceloporus tristichus Variation

Hybrid zones can serve as natural experiments allowing us to investigate the evolutionary consequences of introgression between distinct populations with divergent genomic backgrounds. Modeling hybrid zones using a coalescent framework can provide critical insights into the historical demography of populations, including population divergence times, population sizes, introgression proportions, migration rates, and the timing of hybrid zone formation. We used coalescent analyses to test whether a hybrid zone between Plateau Fence Lizard (Sceloporus tristichus) populations in Arizona formed recently because of human-induced landscape alterations or originated during Pleistocene climatic shifts.