Scincidae). misleading signal in higher-level skink phylogeny (Squamata: Detecting the anomaly zone in species trees and evidence for a

—The anomaly zone presents a major challenge to the accurate resolution of 1 many parts of the Tree of Life. The anomaly zone is defined by the presence of a gene tree 2 topology that is more probable than the true species tree. This discrepancy can result from 3 consecutive rapid speciation events in the species tree. Similar to the problem of 4 long-branch attraction, including more data (loci) will only reinforce the support for the 5 incorrect species tree. Empirical phylogenetic studies often implement coalescent based 6 species tree methods to avoid the anomaly zone, but to this point these studies have not 7 on December 3, 2014 http://biorxiv.org/ Downloaded from