Miocene skinks and geckos reveal long-term conservatism of New Zealand's lizard fauna

Abstract

The New Zealand (NZ) lizard fossil record is currently limited to late Quaternary remains of modern taxa. The St Bathans Fauna (early Miocene, southern South Island) extends this record to 19-16 million years ago (Myr ago). Skull and postcranial elements are similar to extant Oligosoma (Lygosominae) skinks and Hoplodactylus (Diplodactylinae) geckos. There is no evidence of other squamate groups. These fossils, along with coeval sphenodontines, demonstrate a long conservative history for the NZ lepidosaurian fauna, provide new molecular clock calibrations and contradict inferences of a very recent (less than 8 Myr ago) arrival of skinks in NZ.

Early Miocene fossil frogs (Anura: Leiopelmatidae) from New Zealand

“…Already this Early Miocene fauna has a diverse described herpetofauna with sphenodontines, crocodilians, turtles and squamates (Molnar & Pole 1997;Jones et al 2009;Lee MSY et al 2009;Worthy et al 2011a), but the addition of anurans to it is significant. Leiopelma is one of the quintessentially New Zealand taxa and is deeply divergent from its sister taxon Ascaphus (Ascaphidae) which together form the sister group of all other anurans (Frost et al 2006;Roelants et al 2007;Pyron & Wiens 2011).…”

“…Leiopelma is one of the quintessentially New Zealand taxa and is deeply divergent from its sister taxon Ascaphus (Ascaphidae) which together form the sister group of all other anurans (Frost et al 2006;Roelants et al 2007;Pyron & Wiens 2011). Its addition to the St Bathans Fauna shows that all the iconic Recent endemic vertebrate taxa were present in Zealandia (the continental fragment whose emergent part is now New Zealand) during the Early Miocene: sphenodontines, leiopelmatids, moas (Dinornithiformes), kiwi (Apterygidae), New Zealand wrens (Acanthisittidae), adzebills (Aptornithidae) and burrow-ing bats (Mystacinidae) (Molnar & Pole 1997;Hand et al 2007;Jones et al 2009;Lee MSY et al 2009;Tennyson et al 2010;Worthy et al 2010aWorthy et al , 2011b. To this list can be added New Zealand's first terrestrial mammals, from an as yet unidentified group and of similar high biogeographical interest and apparent ancient origins, reported recently from the St Bathans Fauna (Worthy et al 2006).…”

“…This fauna was deposited in littoral zone lacustrine sediments in a palaeolake some 5600 km 2 in area (Pole et al 2003), now widely exposed in the Central Otago region. This fauna is dominated by fish, but includes sphenodontines, crocodilians, turtles, lizards, many birds, bats and a non-therian mammal (Molnar & Pole 1997;Lee MSY et al 2009;Jones et al 2009;Scofield et al 2010;Worthy et al 2006Worthy et al , 2007Worthy et al , 2008Worthy et al , 2009Worthy et al , 2010aWorthy et al , 2010bWorthy et al , 2011aWorthy et al , 2011b. The fossils derive from three specific locations as follows and described by Worthy et al (2007) and Schwarzhans et al (2012) Leiopelma Fitzinger, 1861…”

Bite‐force performance of the last rhynchocephalian (Lepidosauria:Sphenodon)

“…comm. 2008;Jones et al 2009;Lee et al 2009). As previously pointed out, it remains difficult to assess whether this replacement was competitive or opportunistic (Jones 2006b).…”

Reptile Remains from Tiga (Tokanod), Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia

“…The New Caledonian regional herpetofauna is largely unique, with the ex cep tion of a few wide spread, some times hu man -dis persed taxa (e.g., Nactus pelagicus [Girard, 1858] (Scincidae) or geckos (Gekkonidae, Diplodactylidae). We used di ag nos tic char ac ters pre vi ously employed to dis tin guish re lated groups of geckos and skinks in fos sil lo cal i ties of New Zealand and Tonga (Gill 1985, Worthy 1987, Pregill 1993, Lee et al 2009), as well as ad ditional char ac ters based on published os te o logi cal stud ies (Wellborn 1933, Kluge 1962, H ä upl 1980, Bauer 1990a, Abdala 1996, Conrad 2008, Daza 2008, Evans 2008, Gelnaw 2011, Kennedy 2011, Gauthier et al 2012, Jerez 2012 and new ob ser va tions to iden tify the taxa pres ent in our archeological sam ples. It is not cur rently pos si ble to use an apomorphy -based ap proach to di ag nose the two res i dent gekkotan fam i lies (Diplodactylidae and Gekkonidae) from one an other as they ex hibit plesiomorphic and / or con ver gent os te o log i cal char ac ters, at least with re spect to the el e ments pre served in the Tiga ma te ri al; there fore, we have fo cused on char ac ters that are var i able at the ge neric and spe cies level for all of the liz ard ma te rial from Tiga.…”