Underwood's classification of the geckos: a 21st century appreciation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The publication in 1954 of Underwood's ‘On the classification and evolution of geckos’ was the first comprehensive attempt to understand the systematics, evolution and biogeography of this group of lizards. Combining the use of the exploration of novel characters with a global overview of geckos, Underwood erected hypotheses of relationship and patterns of distribution. In the 48 years since that landmark publication much has changed, but much has stayed the same. Underwood's division of geckos into four major clusters is still recognised today, although the sphaerodactyls are now regarded as a group derived from within the gekkonines, and the diplodactylines have been diminished by the removal of several genera and their placement in the gekkonines. The framework that Underwood established has resulted in generic and/or species level phylogenies being generated for the eublepharids, some sphaerodactyls, the carphodactyline diplodactylines and some clusters within the gekkonines. The latter group, because of its size, has remained intractable to detailed systematic analysis at the generic level, although the recognition of many discrete monophyletic clusters within the Gekkonidae (the Gekkoninae of Underwood) holds out the possibility that greater levels of intergeneric resolution are close to realisation. Underwood's initial approach to the systematic analysis of geckos was distinguished by its use of novel characters of the visual system that led to new insights. It is possible that the next breakthrough in higher level systematic analysis of geckos may again come from the exploitation of new character sources. Some examples of these possibilities are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".