Data from: Tracing the origins of Iguanid lizards and Boine snakes of the Pacific

In 1947, when Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon‐Tiki hit ground in the Tuamotu
archipelago, 102 days and 4,000 km from its point of origin in South
America, he inadvertently provided support for one of the most remarkable
hypotheses of vertebrate dispersal. Iguanid lizards and boine snakes are
ancient Gondwanan lineages whose distribution has been demonstrated to
have been influenced by continental drift. Their enigmatic presence on the
islands of the Pacific, however, has drawn fantastical conclusions of more
than 8,000‐km rafting from the Americas. We reexamine the hypothesis of
dispersal in light of new molecular data and divergence time estimates.
Our results suggest an early Paleogene (50–60 million years) divergence of
these groups and the plausibility of an Asiatic or Australian (over land)
source. Because the subfossil record indicates that iguanas (but not
snakes) were a primary food source of island inhabitants, the absence of
these species from islands with a longer history of human presence is
unsurprising. Together these findings are taken as evidence of the
influence humans have had on these taxa and are put forth as an example of
anthropogenic obfuscation of biogeographic history. We suggest that this
history is one of terrestrial connections permitting the colonization of
the islands of the Pacific.