Abstract. — We examine phylogenetic relationships among anoles using mitochondrial DNA se-quences from the NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 gene (ND2) and ve transfer-RNA genes repre-senting 1,455 alignable base positions and 866 phylogenetically informative characters (parsimony criterion). We also present 16 morphological characters for phylogenetic analysis. Our analyses yielded poorly-supported nodes deep in the anole tree but many well-supported nodes for more recent phylogenetic divergences. We test the hypothesis that the major clades of anoles form a hard polytomy and present a general statistical framework for testing hypotheses of simultaneous branching of lineages by using molecular sequence data. Our results suggest that rapid diversi-cation early in the evolutionary history of anoles explains why numerous researchers have had difculty reconstructing well-supported dichotomous phylogenetic trees for anoles. [Anolis; mito-chondrial DNA; parametric bootstrap; permutation test; phylogeny; polytomy.] Anoles are a classic example of adaptive radiation (Jackman et al., 1997), featuring oc-cupation of a great variety of habitats and corresponding diversity in form (Williams, 1983; Losos et al., 1998). Nearly 400 species of anoles are recognized, 140 of which oc
