it. This is not the only contradiction in Camp's views. 



In his phylogenetic tree. Camp located the Gekkota and Iguania on op- 

 posite sides of the tree. Although acknovleding the contradiction of the 

 proposed kinship between the two, he referred to the inadequacies of a two- 

 dimensional phylogenetic diagram, not realizing that the proximity of any 

 groups in space reflects only convergence and not kinship. Thus, by suggest- 

 ing the possibility of a secondary relationship between the Gekkota and 

 Iguania, Camp undermined his own ideas. 



Scincoidea 



Xaniusioidea 

 QeckoU 



tacertoidea 



Platynota Diplogtosja 

 Ampjiisbaenoidea 



Scincbmrpha Anguwiorpha Iguania 



Autafchoglossa 



Atcalabota 



^unt 



Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree of Lacertilia (after Camp) 



All the differences between the Ascalabota and the Autarchoglossa, 

 according to Camp, are due to adaptations to different habitats: the former 

 has a strong tendency toward an arboreal mode of life, the latter, never 

 having been adapted to climbing, lives on the ground, often with an un- 

 dulatory specialization (reduction of limbs, snake-like body) in turn never 

 observed in Ascalabota. This clearly contradicts the large number of shared 

 characters of Gekkota and Scincomorpha which thus cannot be explained by 

 convergence, as the habitats of these animals are different and contrarily 

 suggests the similarity between Gekkota and Iguanomorpha may be secondary. 



It seems to us that one of the main defects of Camp's classification is 

 its dependency on static characters, characters whose developmental history 

 has not been studied. In those cases where a character, such as m. rectus 

 abdominis superficialis , has its own history Camp's classification begins to 

 suffer from its own contradictions. 



Before we present original material we must note that paleontology 

 still plays a very small role in the \inraveling of the phylogeny of lizards, 

 partly because of the extremely poor knowledge of the comparative osteology 

 of modern forms . 



The main role in constructing the phylogen^r of Lacertilia at present 

 can only be played by comparative morphology and to a lesser degree by 

 comparative embryology, thus all conclusions will be to some degree hypo- 



