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Thomas Bader wrote:If I remember right, Werner told me that the two Western Algyroides are further away from the Eastern two A. species than Dinarolacerta, but I am not really sure about that

The only potentially paraphyletic genus is Algyroides,as Dinarolacerta (D. mosorensis and D. montenegrina) consistently clusters with Algyroides in all trees. In spite of this association being present repeatedly, the difference in fit between the tree constrained with monophyly and the unconstrained tree is not statistically significant (B10  1), thus the support for the paraphyly of Algyroides is not sufficient given the present data. Nevertheless, in the light of morphological differences between Algyroides and Dinarolacerta even an indication of the very close relationship is surprising and should be examined closer. The morphological characters considered synapomorphies of Algyroides (e.g., large dorsal scales with micro ornamentation; Arnold et al., 2007) are practically absent in Dinarolacerta.If Dinarolacerta were a subclade within Algyroides, these characteristics would therefore have been lost secondarily, for example as an adaptation to narrow crevices, i.e., a special niche within the rock habitats. A perhaps useful hint for the morphological study, could be that Dinarolacerta always appears in the same position and splits Algyroides into two groups reflecting the distributions in the western (A. fitzingeri + A. marchi), respectively, more eastern part of the Mediterranean region (A. moreoticus + A. nigropunctatus). These relationships within the genus Algyroides have been found before based on morphology and molecular data (Harris et al., 1999b).