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| Psammodynastes pulverulentus (Boie, 1827) Psammodynastidae new family Das, Greenbaum, Brecko, Pauwels, Ruane, Pirro & Merilä, 2024 photo: Rushen Jaihan |
Abstract
Asian mock vipers of the genus Psammodynastes and African forest snakes of the genus Buhoma are two genera belonging to the snake superfamily Elapoidea. The phylogenetic placements of Psammodynastes and Buhoma within Elapoidea has been extremely unstable which has resulted in their uncertain and debated taxonomy. We used ultraconserved elements and traditional nuclear and mitochondrial markers to infer the phylogenetic relationships of these two genera with other elapoids. Psammodynastes, for which a reference genome has been sequenced, were found, with strong branch support, to be a relatively early diverging split within Elapoidea that is sister to a clade consisting of Elapidae, Micrelapidae and Lamprophiidae. Hence, we allocate Psammodynastes to its own family, Psammodynastidae new family. However, the phylogenetic position of Buhoma could not be resolved with a high degree of confidence. Attempts to identify the possible sources of conflict in the rapid radiation of elapoid snakes suggest that both hybridisation/introgression during the rapid diversification, including possible ghost introgression, as well as incomplete lineage sorting likely have had a confounding role. The usual practice of combining mitochondrial loci with nuclear genomic data appears to mislead phylogeny reconstructions in rapid radiation scenarios, especially in the absence of genome scale data.
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| Psammodynastes pulverulentus. photo: Rushen Jaihan |
Psammodynastidae new family
Type genus: Psammodynastes Günther, 1858
Type species: Psammodynastes pulverulentus (Boie, 1827)
Etymology: The generic name is a combination of ancient Greek word psammos (ψάμμος, meaning sand) and dynastes (δυνάστης, meaning ruler). We derive the family name by adding -idae to the stem of the generic suffix.
Contents: Psammodynastes pulverulentus (Boie, 1827), P. pictus Günther, 1858
Distribution: South Asia (North-eastern India, Nepal), southern China, Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesian archipelago, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Philippines) and Taiwan.
Sunandan Das, Eli Greenbaum, Jonathan Brecko, Olivier S. G. Pauwels, Sara Ruane, Stacy Pirro and Juha Merilä. 2024. Phylogenomics of Psammodynastes and Buhoma (Elapoidea: Serpentes), with the Description of A New Asian Snake Family. Scientific Reports. 9489. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-60215-2
phys.org/news/2024-05-viper-mimicking-snake-asia-unique.html
