Welcome to the Thorpe Group

The Thorpe Group, led by Prof Roger Thorpe, of the School of Biology, University of Wales, Bangor, is concerned with research into natural selection, phylogeography, phylogeny, geographic variation and speciation in lizards and snakes.

The group uses a multidisciplinary approach of field experiments, multivariate analysis of quantitative traits, molecular phylogeny, population genetics/molecular ecology, and numerical hypothesis testing to investigate the pattern and causes of microevolution and speciation.

This work has tended to focus on island lizards in the Canaries and Lesser Antilles and venomous snakes after an earlier interest in the methods of analysing geographic variation in the Palaearctic ringed snake and Pleistocene effects on its distribution.