Of these, the lizards form a
paraphyletic group,[1] since "lizards" excludes the subclades of snakes and amphisbaenians. Studies of squamate relationships using molecular biology have found several distinct lineages, though the specific details of their interrelationships vary from one study to the next. One example of a modern classification of the squamates[2][3] found the following relationships:
Below is a
cladogram from the
phylogenetic analysis of Daza et al. (2012) (a morphological analysis), showing the interrelationships of extinct and living iguanians:[4]
^Wiens, J. J.; Hutter, C. R.; Mulcahy, D. G.; Noonan, B. P.; Townsend, T. M.; Sites, J. W.; Reeder, T. W. (2012). "Resolving the phylogeny of lizards and snakes (Squamata) with extensive sampling of genes and species". Biology Letters. 8 (6): 1043–1046.
doi:
10.1098/rsbl.2012.0703.
^Daza, J. D.; Abdala, V.; Arias, J. S.; García-López, D.; Ortiz, P. (2012). "Cladistic Analysis of Iguania and a Fossil Lizard from the Late Pliocene of Northwestern Argentina". Journal of Herpetology. 46: 104.
doi:
10.1670/10-112.
^Cite error: The named reference Lee was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).