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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RBINS Staff Publications 2024
Archeological sites usually provide important information about the past distribution ofsmall vertebrate fauna, and by extension about past terrestrial environments and climatein which human activities took place. In this context, Belgium has an interesting location innorthwestern Europe between the fully studied zooarcheological records of Germany andEngland. We present here the revision of the late Pleistocene (Marine Isotope Stages 3 and 2)collection of the “Caverne Marie-Jeanne” (Hastière-Lavaux, Namur), studied by Jean-ClaudeRage in the 1970s and the revision of the whole “indeterminate” small vertebrate materialsfrom the “Caverne Marie-Jeanne” stored in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences(RBINS) Quaternary collections in search of more herpetofaunal remains. It is now by farthe largest late Pleistocene collection at RBINS with more than 20,500 recognized bonesof amphibians and reptiles and covering the last 60,000 years. The faunal list comprisestwo urodeles (Lissotriton gr. L. vulgaris and Salamandra salamandra), four anurans (Bufo gr.B. bufo-spinosus, Epidalea calamita, Rana temporaria and Rana cf. R. arvalis), three lizards(Lacerta cf. L. agilis, Zootoca vivipara and Anguis gr. A. fragilis), and three snakes (Natrix gr.N. natrix, Coronella austriaca, and Vipera berus). This study represents the first fossil record in Belgium for L. gr. L. vulgaris, R. arvalis, Z. vivipara, N. gr. N. natrix and C. austriaca. As awhole, this assemblage suggests a patchy humid landscape under colder and dryer climaticconditions in comparison with present ones. This study also underlines the necessity of aprimary separation in larger taxonomical categories by the specialist itself.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2019
