[Taxacom] Garbage dispersal of iguanas to Madagascar

[John Grehan]

Here's another predictable example of garbage biogeography. Garbage,
because it fails to address the reality that fossil calibrated ages are
minimums only. By maintaining the fiction that fossil calibrated ages are
something else, this paper (citation below) misrepresents fossil calibrated
ages as evidence for iguanas in Madagascar to have arrived after separation
from Africa, via rafting on vegetation (I would call this floating on
metaphysical garbage) from South America (where its sister group is
present). It's all a total fabrication, now verging on fraud (I use that
term because the failure to address the fossil age minimum criterion has to
be deliberate since the critique is widely published and known). Anyone who
wants a copy but does not have access, and is interested to see it to
evaluate my assessment further, is welcome to get a copy from me. Cheers,
John Grehan

Welt, S.R. & Raxworthy, J.C. 2021. Dispersal, not vicariance, explains the
biogeographic origin of iguanas on Madagascar, Molecular Phylogenetics and
Evolution.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2021.107345