Understanding how phenotypic diversity evolves is a major interest of evolutionary biology. Habitat use is an important factor in the evolution of phenotypic diversity of many animal species. Interestingly, male and female phenotypes have been frequently shown to respond differently to environmental variation. At the macroevolutionary level, this difference between the sexes is frequently analyzed by using phylogenetic comparative tools to assess variation in sexual dimorphism (SD) across taxa in relation to habitat. A shortcoming of such analyses is that they evaluate the degree of dimorphism itself and therefore they do not provide access to the evolutionary trajectories of each sex. As such, the relative contribution of male and female phenotypes on macroevolutionary patterns of sexual dimorphism cannot be directly assessed. Here we investigate how habitat use shapes phenotypic diversity in wall lizards by using phylogenetic comparative tools to simultaneously assess the tempo and mode of evolution in males, females and the degree of sexual dimorphism. We find both sexes have globally diversified under similar, but not identical, processes, where habitat use seems to drive macroevolutionary variation in head shape, but not in body size or relative limb length. However, we also observe small differences in the evolutionary dynamics of male and female phenotypes that have a marked impact on macroevolutionary patterns of SD, with important implications for our interpretation of what drives phenotypic diversification within and between the sexes.

Dated and scaled phylogenyDated chronogram used for analyses, rescaled to unit total length, and with associated ancestral character states for habitat use obtained using maximum likelihood.scaledPodarcisphylo.treFemale trait means per speciesSpecies means of log-transformed trait values for females.asymptLSM.FMale trait means per speciesSpecies means of log-transformed trait values for females, based on the 10 largest individuals per species.asymptLSM.M