IVERSON ET AL. – Supertrees 85 Defining Turtle Diversity: Proceedings of a Workshop on Genetics, Ethics, and Taxonomy of Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises H. Bradley Shaffer, Nancy N. FitzSimmons, Arthur Georges, and Anders G.J. Rhodin, Eds. Chelonian Research Monographs 4:85–106 • © 2007 by Chelonian Research Foundation In Search of the Tree of Life for Turtles JOHN B. IVERSON1, RAFE M. BROWN2, THOMAS S. AKRE3, THOMAS J. NEAR4, MINH LE5, ROBERT C. THOMSON6, AND DAVID E. STARKEY7 1Department of Biology, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana 47374 USA [
[email protected]]; 2Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas, Lawrence 66045 USA [
[email protected]]; 3Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia 23909 USA [
[email protected]]; 4Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA [
[email protected]]; 5Department of Herpetology and Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, New York 10024 USA, and Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, 2960 Broadway, New York, New York 10027 USA [
[email protected]]; 6Section of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, California 95616 USA [
[email protected]]; 7Department of Biology, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas 72035 USA [
[email protected]] ABSTRACT. – Based on a thorough review of the literature, we provide a bibliography of papers featuring phylogenetic hypotheses for living turtles, a composite tree of all turtle species based on those hypotheses, a compilation of the most rigorously derived trees from those papers (i.e., using contemporary methods with bootstrapping), and supertrees for selected families of turtles using input trees from those most rigorous trees.