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The Solomon Islands host a diverse terrestrial vertebrate fauna which has played a formative role in the development of speciation theory. Yet, despite over a century of biological exploration in the region, there are many islands for which we have incomplete knowledge of the vertebrate fauna. In 2019, we spent 20 days on Tetepare Island in the Western Province, Solomon Islands. Tetepare has a long history of conservation action by local communities and it is now the largest uninhabited tropical island in the world. We recorded 57 species of birds, 13 mammals, 5 amphibians, and 21 reptiles. Of these, we documented six species for the first time on Tetepare by western scientists: one frog, three non-avian reptiles, and two mammals. These findings point to a continued need for basic biological inventory work to inform research, local conservation efforts, and to increase published knowledge of the biodiversity in the Solomon Islands. Keywords: amphibians, birds, mammals, Melanesia, squamates, tropical South Pacific, Whitney South Sea Expedition, THE SOLOMON ARCHIPELAGO is a biodiverse region that is well known for its unique composition of terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, squamates, amphibians, and birds). Due in part to its high degree [...]

Body size is a key morphological attribute, often used to delimit species boundaries among closely related taxa. But body size can evolve in parallel, reaching similar final states despite independent evolutionary and geographic origins, leading to faulty assumptions of evolutionary history. Here, we document parallel evolution in body size in the widely distributed leaf-nosed bat genus Hipposideros , which has misled both taxonomic and evolutionary inference. We sequenced reduced representation genomic loci and measured external morphological characters from three closely related species from the Solomon Islands archipelago, delimited by body size. Species tree reconstruction confirms the paraphyly of two morphologically designated species. The nonsister relationship between large-bodied H. dinops lineages found on different islands indicates that large-bodied ecomorphs have evolved independently at least twice in the history of this radiation. A lack of evidence for gene flow between sympatric, closely related taxa suggests the rapid evolution of strong reproductive isolating barriers between morphologically distinct populations. Our results position Solomon Islands Hipposideros as a novel vertebrate system for studying the repeatability of parallel evolution under natural conditions. We conclude by offering testable hypotheses for how geography and ecology could be mediating the repeated evolution of large-bodied Hipposideros lineages in the Solomon Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]