**1. Introduction**

Island ecosystems often display highly diverse communities, distinct from their continental counterparts. This has led to a rich body of work examining communities on islands to understand their ecological dynamics and the processes that promoted their formation [1–3]. As a result, islands have served as model systems for examining evolutionary processes like community assembly and speciation. Particularly in taxonomic groups with reduced lability, an island–mainland divide can promote allopatric speciation, leading to island endemism [4–6]. Many archipelagos that have featured prominently in the annals of evolutionary biology are of volcanic origin (e.g., the Canary, Galápagos, and Hawaiian Islands), where the nature of their formation necessitates any inhabitants to have almost certainly arrived via overwater dispersal [7], but the process of community assembly on continental islands can be different. While dispersal is a viable explanation for communities on continental islands, any historical connection to the mainland yields the possibility of a vicariant origin for those species. In some cases, support for both options has been presented for a variety of taxa inhabiting the same island or archipelago, with disagreement among biologists [8] and sources within. These studies on island biogeography have produced important, although sometimes controversial ideas [9,10] and additional studies may continue to influence our current understanding of island communities.

One group of organisms that has been influential in our understanding of island biogeography and community assembly therein, are anole lizards (family Dactyloidae). Anoles are highly diverse with 429 species, [11,12] and display a variety of morphological and ecological differences. They inhabit a wide breadth of microhabitats from forest floor to canopy, exhibit a concomitant array of morphological features adapted to exploiting those niches, and display equally diverse behaviors and ecological characteristics [13]. Studies of Caribbean anoles have figured prominently in the literature with respect to novel ecological and evolutionary patterns [14–16] and have played a role in testing hypotheses of island colonization [17,18]. Caribbean anole research has supported overwater dispersal as the generally accepted paradigm for the biogeographic origin Caribbean anoles [19,20]. However, this line of inquiry has been limited to the Caribbean islands, and studies of anoles in Pacific Islands have been lacking.

The paucity of work on Pacific anoles may be attributable to a lack of taxa and islands as only a combined seven species of anoles (Figure 1) are known from the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) across three islands (Islas Cocos, Gorgona, and Malpelo; Figures 2 and 3). The islands are variable in ecology and geology, which may impact the evolution of their biotic communities. Anoles occupying these islands span the extreme ends of the dactyloid phylogeny [20,21], and are highly variable in ecology and natural history (reviewed below). Genetic analyses of these species may shed light on the evolutionary patterns and processes in the Pacific Islands, as well as provide a framework for the comparison of evolutionary patterns to the Caribbean anoles to better understand island evolution. Among the Pacific islands inhabited by anoles, only two contain a single species of anole or "solitary anoles" (*sensu* Schoener [22]): Isla Malpelo, Colombia is occupied by *Dactyloa agassizi,* and Isla Cocos, Costa Rica is inhabited by *Norops townsendi*. The third Pacific anole island, Isla Gorgona off Colombia, is occupied by five species: *D. chocorum*, *D. gorgonae*, *D. princeps*, *N. medemi*, and *N. parvauritus* (Figure 1). Below we briefly review each island in terms of geologic origin and known ecomorphology of their anole communities.

**Figure 1.** Seven species of anoles found on the islands in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). Top row, left to right: *Dactyloa agassizi* (Isla Malpelo), *Dactyloa gorgonae* (Isla Gorgona), *Norops townsendi* (Isla Cocos). Bottom row: *Norops medemi*, *Norops parvauritus*, *Dactyloa princeps*, *Dactyloa chocorum* (all Isla Gorgona).

**Figure 2.** Three islands that are home to the anoles in the ETP. (**a**) Isla Malpelo, (**b**) Isla Cocos, (**c**) Isla Gorgona.

**Figure 3.** Map of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) with the three islands in this study. Mainland sampling localities for *Norops biporcatus* and *N. parvauritus* included in the molecular phylogeny are also shown.

While there is debate within the anole community as to the generic level nomenclature of anoles, herein we opt for the eight-genus model proposed by Nicholson et al. [11,18], highlighting the evolutionary distinctness among anoles. Our study illustrates the utility of treating *Norops* and *Dactyloa* as the distinct non-sister genera separated by as much as 31–87 million years ([11,23]; although Román-Palacios et al. [24] performed more rigorous comparative analyses on the dating methods suggesting this basal divergence likely occurred 51–65 Mya). If considered the same genus, a reader who is unfamiliar with the intricacies of anole taxonomy may erroneously assume that solitary anoles *D. agassizi* and *N. townsendi* are comparable in morphology and ecology, which is a misleading assumption. Each species is more closely related to separate clades of solitary Caribbean anoles which make for more appropriate comparisons of ecomorphological evolution on islands (*D. extrema*, *D. luciae*, and *D. roquet* for *D. agassizi* and *N. concolor*, *N. lineatus*, and *N. pinchoti* for *N. townsendi*; [25]).
