Riddle of the Skinks

I've been officially in grad school now for a few weeks, and it's about time that I actually nailed down what my thesis project is going to be.  Originally I was going to work on Western Australian agamid lizards, but I was informed that there was an easier group to work on: skinks.  The argument was this 'nothing is known about the morphology of australian agamids but next to nothing is known about australian skinks.'  Consequentially, the lizard that I'll be describing in minute detail is a small, sand swimming skink named Eremiascincus.  That is a good start, but what exactly will be the usefulness of describing this species if there is nothing described to compare it to.  Supposedly the goal of this project is to provide a tool for identifying isolated skull fragments in the fossil record.  Knowing the detailed osteology of one lizard basically tells you: okay, it's not that one, it must be one of the other 150 closely related species.

It turns out that the reason that little is known is not for a lack of trying, but rather the fact that the details one must consider are so fine and esoteric that little progress is even possible.  For example, Eremiascincus was erected as a separate genus in 1979 after about 150 in the genus Sphenomorphus, a genus that contained more than 150 species.  None of the diagnostic characters used to erect the genus were osteological.  In fact, what apparently justified making it a separate genus was a the possession of a line of dorsal ridges and either lots of stripes or very few stripes (depending on which species of Eremiascincus one is examining).  Stripiness?!  Seriously!?  The description isn't much help either, listing characters that definitely place it in the Sphenomorphous group of skinks, but are characters that hardly make it unique (quite the opposite really).  

Then there is the diagnosis of the Sphenomorphous group.  It turns out that the genus sphenomorphous is no longer used to refer to any Australian skinks.  All the the Australian sphenomorphine skinks were placed into other genera.  As soon as I find out what they were put into and on what basis, I might have something to go on.   As it is, there is an ok phylogenetic tree available based on molecular data, but I'd really only use that for corroboration of morphological data, or to look at what closely related taxa to describe with Eremiascincus.