A study in scarlet: incipient speciation, phenotypic differentiation and conservation implications of the Podarcis lizards of the western Pontine islands, Italy
During the first decades of the last Century an enigmatic extinction was documented to have occurred on the small Mediterranean island of Santo Stefano and Sherlock Holmes was jokingly evoked to solve the mystery. Although islands are fascinating systems where to study microevolutionary processes, they may, on the other hand, host unstable communities that make their populations particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic effects and even to extinctions.