The Amazon forest is the largest continumm tropical forest around the world and several mecanisms have been proposed to explain its high biological diversity. The Refuge Hypothesis is one of the most debated explanations used and is based on the contraction of forested areas during dry periods, restricting populations to forest refugia. Forests expand during wet periods and these climatic and vegetational oscillations during the Pleistocene would be responsible for speciation and distribution patterns seen in Amazonian species. However, recent molecular phylogenetic studies confront this notion by indicating that most divergences among tropical forest vertebrate species predate the Pleistocene period. The Anolis chrysolepis clade, along with Anolis bombiceps, was previously studied and cited as a classic example of Pleistocene speciation, but recent studies showed substantial molecular divergence in the complex indicating that further studies about the subspecies relationships will demonstrate they are distinct species. We used the mithocondrial gene (ND2) to estimate phylogenetic relationships among the Anolis chrysolepis subspecies and the taxa previously hypothetized as related to them. In addition, their morphology and taxonomy status were revisited in order to confirm the congruence among the molecular and morphological datasets, determining if morphologically defined taxa are valid species. Based on both datasets, we elevate the five subspecies of Anolis chrysolepis to species status, diagnosticating each one of them with comments about the main morphological differences between the sister taxon and providing new distribution data.
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