BACKGROUND: Relatively recent (Plio-Pleistocene) climatic variations had strong impacts on the fauna and flora of temperate-zone North America and Europe; genetic analyses suggest that many lineages were restricted to unglaciated refuges during this time, and have expanded their ranges since then. Temperate-zone Australia experienced less severe glaciation, suggesting that patterns of genetic structure among species may reflect older (aridity-driven) divergence events rather than Plio-Pleistocene (thermally-mediated) divergences. The lizard genus Bassiana (Squamata, Scincidae) contains three species that occur across a wide area of southern Australia (including Tasmania), rendering them ideally-suited to studies on the impact of past climatic fluctuations.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We performed molecular phylogenetic and dating analyses using two partial mitochondrial genes (ND2 and ND4) of 97 samples of Bassiana spp. Our results reveal a pattern of diversification beginning in the Middle Miocene, with intraspecific diversification arising from 5.7 to 1.7 million years ago in the Upper Miocene-Lower Pleistocene.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: In contrast to the temperate-zone Northern Hemisphere biota, patterns of evolutionary diversification within southern Australian taxa appear to reflect geologically ancient events, mostly relating to east-west discontinuities imposed by aridity rather than (as is the case in Europe and North America) relatively recent recolonisation of northern regions from unglaciated refugia to the south.