Skip to main content
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2004 May 7;271(Suppl 4):S226–S229. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0151

Molecular evidence for a terrestrial origin of snakes.

Nicolas Vidal 1, S Blair Hedges 1
PMCID: PMC1810015  PMID: 15252991

Abstract

Biologists have debated the origin of snakes since the nineteenth century. One hypothesis suggests that snakes are most closely related to terrestrial lizards, and reduced their limbs on land. An alternative hypothesis proposes that snakes are most closely related to Cretaceous marine lizards, such as mosasaurs, and reduced their limbs in water. A presumed close relationship between living monitor lizards, believed to be close relatives of the extinct mosasaurs, and snakes has bolstered the marine origin hypothesis. Here, we show that DNA sequence evidence does not support a close relationship between snakes and monitor lizards, and thus supports a terrestrial origin of snakes.

Full Text

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (187.8 KB).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Baur G. On the Characters and Systematic Position of the Large Sea-Lizards, Mosasauridae. Science. 1890 Nov 7;16(405):262–262. doi: 10.1126/science.ns-16.405.262-a. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Coates M, Ruta M. Nice snake, shame about the legs. Trends Ecol Evol. 2000 Dec 1;15(12):503–507. doi: 10.1016/s0169-5347(00)01999-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  3. Forstner M. R., Davis S. K., Arévalo E. Support for the hypothesis of anguimorph ancestry for the suborder Serpentes from phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 1995 Mar;4(1):93–102. doi: 10.1006/mpev.1995.1010. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  4. Greene H. W., Cundall D. Perspectives: evolutionary biology. Limbless tetrapods and snakes with legs. Science. 2000 Mar 17;287(5460):1939–1941. doi: 10.1126/science.287.5460.1939. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  5. Lee Michael S. Y., Scanlon John D. Snake phylogeny based on osteology, soft anatomy and ecology. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2002 Aug;77(3):333–401. doi: 10.1017/s1464793102005924. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  6. Macey J. R., Verma A. Re: Homology in phylogenetic analysis: alignment of transfer RNA genes and the phylogenetic position of snakes. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 1997 Apr;7(2):272–279. doi: 10.1006/mpev.1997.0379. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  7. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1997.0005. [DOI] [PMC free article] [Google Scholar]
  8. Rest Joshua S., Ast Jennifer C., Austin Christopher C., Waddell Peter J., Tibbetts Elizabeth A., Hay Jennifer M., Mindell David P. Molecular systematics of primary reptilian lineages and the tuatara mitochondrial genome. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2003 Nov;29(2):289–297. doi: 10.1016/s1055-7903(03)00108-8. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  9. Saint K. M., Austin C. C., Donnellan S. C., Hutchinson M. N. C-mos, a nuclear marker useful for squamate phylogenetic analysis. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 1998 Oct;10(2):259–263. doi: 10.1006/mpev.1998.0515. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  10. Tchernov E., Rieppel O., Zaher H., Polcyn M. J., Jacobs L. L. A fossil snake with limbs. Science. 2000 Mar 17;287(5460):2010–2012. doi: 10.1126/science.287.5460.2010. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  11. Vidal Nicolas, Hedges S. Blair. Higher-level relationships of caenophidian snakes inferred from four nuclear and mitochondrial genes. C R Biol. 2002 Sep;325(9):987–995. doi: 10.1016/s1631-0691(02)01509-3. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  12. Vidal Nicolas, Hedges S. Blair. Higher-level relationships of snakes inferred from four nuclear and mitochondrial genes. C R Biol. 2002 Sep;325(9):977–985. doi: 10.1016/s1631-0691(02)01510-x. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Supplementary Materials

Supplementary data file
15252991supp.pdf (201.3KB, pdf)

Articles from Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences are provided here courtesy of The Royal Society

RESOURCES