[3][4] This species of lizard, along with many other reptiles, was first studied by the Danish apothecary Albert Heinrich Riise who in 1838 had moved to town of Taphus (which means 'bar', owing to the amount of rum produced and served there) on Sankt Thomas Island in the Danish West Indies to eventually open a pharmacy and distillery of medicinal rums and bitters.

[10][11] Riise, successful in this endeavour, was also extremely interested in the natural history of his surroundings, and by the 1840s had begun to ship ample specimens of plants and animals to Copenhagen, and many also found their way elsewhere throughout Europe and the young United States.

In Copenhagen the zoologists Johannes Theodor Reinhardt and Christian Frederik Lütken had begun work on a great monograph, eventually some 200 pages excluding illustrations, on the amphibians and reptiles of the Danish West Indies and the wider Caribbean, much of it based on the extensive collections of Riise.

Riise had collected numerous specimens of this lizard from the islands of St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, Vieques, Tortola and Jost van Dyke, which Reinhardt and Lütken had described as Anolis dorsomaculatus, and named as such numerous specimens that had already been distributed to museums throughout Europe and the Americas.

[4] Unfortunately for them however, just before they were set to publish their work, the young American Edward Drinker Cope, an industrious man, hungry for recognition, who had been given a job cataloguing the herpetological collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia,[12] had also set upon the Riise specimens (Cope consistently misspells his name as Rüse throughout his article) and rushed to describe the new species for posterity himself, publishing his work a week or two earlier than them, which necessitated a rush of last minute changes to their manuscript in the days before it could be brought to the printers.

[4] For the next century and a half the taxonomy remained stable and uncontroversial, but in 1986 Craig Guyer and Jay M. Savage attempted to split the very large genus Anolis based on skeletal, immunology and karyological datasets used together in a type of cladistics method called "successive weighted characters", thus moving most species into a new very large genus called Norops.

[2][13] Because this splitting caused the new remaining genera to be paraphyletic,[14][15][16] In 2012 the same authors, Guyer and Savage, together with Kirsten Nicholson and Brian Crother, gave Ctenonotus another go, although soon after, in 2013, other taxonomists again pointed out flaws in this approach.

[3][20][21] Cope chooses the descriptive name 'saddled' because according to him the species has four characteristic dark brown transverse bars across its back, and another across its tail.

It has a pale colored, hour-glass shaped spots from the nape of its neck to its tail, and also has a black, crescent-shaped patch behind the eye.

[3][4] This species has one of the widest natural distributions of all the anoles of Puerto Rico[7] and this range includes the many islands surrounding it such a Vieques and Culebra.

[13][24] On the islet of Cayo Santiago and the nearby southern coastal regions of Puerto Rico, such as the city of Ponce, it is also less common than A.

[26] The barred anole is also found, but to a lesser extent, in the coffee plantations of the barrios of Sabana Grande, Vivi Arriba, and Mameye.

[13][24] It is a commonly observed animal in the northern United States Virgin Islands, specifically the north side of St.

[22] The anoles of this species which are found in the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico generally occupy the tabonuco, Dacryodes excelsa, tree canopy, which range from 10 to 20 meters in height from the ground.

[6] Despite their incredibly vast numbers here,[23] the lizards may be difficult to see for visitors to the forests, because they live high up in the canopy[6] and are camouflaged.

[8] After hurricanes which may periodically strafe this region and tear down much of the canopy, leaving the forests with mostly upright but completely denuded trees, these lizards are then seen in great abundance because they then live amongst the fallen branches and foliage, which can be up to five meters thick.

The color pattern of spots and markings makes it well-camouflaged against the lichen-spotted tree bark on which it commonly resides.

[8] The lizard prefers smaller branches and individuals have a small range, only venturing around a territory of no more than 6 meters for foraging and mating.

[8] In the Los Tres Picachos State Forest it occurs together with A. cristatellus, A. cuvieri, A. evermanni, A. gundlachi, A. krugi, A. occultus and A.

[8] A. stratulus has a diet consisting of mainly ants,[6][7] but also consumes other insects such as beetles and flies,[7][23][25] as well as land snails[7] and spiders.