Lauren Leffer is a science, tech, and environmental reporter based in Brooklyn, NY. She writes on many subjects including artificial intelligence, climate, and weird biology because she’s curious to a fault. When she’s not writing, she’s hopefully hiking.
In a square-rectangle sort of way, snakes are technically lizards, but for semantics’ sake and because snakes are so distinctive, biologists separate snakes and lizards into different categories. Despite being nested within the same branch of the tree of life, legless, lengthy, and slithering snakes–capable of unhinging their jaws and delivering a venomous bite–stand out from their reptilian clade-mates. New research sheds light on just how unique snakes are, and underscores an enduring mystery.
Tristan Schramer, University of Michigan Thinking of evolution in terms of singularities is a perspective shift for a field where processes are generally understood to unfold incrementally and slowly. The emergence of new species is usually explained as happening on islands through geographic separation, or as the result of drawn out predator-prey interactions, or emerging from disease pressure over time.
Ivan Prates, University of Michigan And this multiplication of snakes is still ongoing, says Rabosky. There’s no sign that things are slowing down anytime soon, he emphasizes, and there’s likely lots out there left to discover. Indeed, scientists are finding new species of snakes all the time. In one example from earlier this month, biologists uncovered that the largest known species of snake, the green anaconda, is actually two genetically distinct species.
Dan Rabosky, University of Michigan “Snakes are special and weird,” says Nick Longrich, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the University of Bath in the UK who has previously researched snakes’ diversification but was uninvolved in the new study. “I think that, here, they’ve successfully quantified it”. Sara Ruane, a herpetologist and assistant curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, agrees that the new study breaks ground.
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