ABSTRACT

This chapter presents snake lizard phylogeny and begins with an exploration of long-standing and new phylogenies of snake lizard ingroup and sistergroup relationships. It focuses on critical points of philosophy and method and its vision of time, morphology and molecules and imagination. The chapter reviews the long history since Cope of conflicting phylogenies of snake lizard sister group relationships with various lizard clades, followed by an equally brief review of snake lizard interrelationships. Cosmologists and astrophysicists study fossil light, red-shifting galaxies, the existence and mass of dark matter and what it means, the chemistry and physics of stars, and so on, as they try to unravel the origin and expansion of the universe and its constituent parts. Extrapolating from a cladogram to a phylogeny permits the assessment of hypothetical statements of evolutionary relationship derived from a suite of most parsimonius cladograms built upon homologies as read from synapomorphies.