Abstract
Reptiles are still being described worldwide at a pace of hundreds of species a year. While many discoveries are from remote tropical areas, biodiverse arid regions still harbor many novel taxa. Here, we present an updated phylogeny of colubrid snakes from the Western Palearctic by analyzing a supermatrix of all available global snake species with molecular data and report on the discovery of a new genus and species of colubrine snake from southeastern Iran. The new taxon, named Persiophis fahimii Gen. et sp. nov., is nested within a clade containing Middle Eastern and South Asian ground racers (Lytorhynchus, Rhynchocalamus, Wallaceophis, and Wallophis). This species has a derived morphology including an edentulous pterygoid and occurrence of short and blunt teeth on the palatine, maxillae and dentary bones, an elongated snout and a relatively trihedral first supralabial scale that is slightly bigger than the second, and elongated toward the tip of rostral. We also report on the osteology and phylogenetic placement of several poorly studied colubrines: Hierophis andreanus (reassigned to Dolichophis) and Muhtarophis barani.
Highlights
The family Colubridae is the most speciose group of snakes, inhabiting a diverse array of ecosystems worldwide except Antarctica and some remote oceanic islands (Vitt & Caldwell, 2013)
The electronic version of this article in Portable Document Format (PDF) will represent a published work according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and the new names contained in the electronic version are effectively published under that Code from the electronic edition alone
Though Hierophis andreanus was originally described as Zamenis andreana by Werner (1917), it was an unknown and forgotten snake not listed in regional checklists (Latifi, 1991; Leviton et al, 1992) until researchers in the first decade of 21st century shed light on its distribution (Rajabizadeh & Rastegar-Pouyani, 2006; Rajabizadeh & Rastegar-Pouyani, 2009; Schätti, 2001)
Summary
The family Colubridae is the most speciose group of snakes, inhabiting a diverse array of ecosystems worldwide except Antarctica and some remote oceanic islands (Vitt & Caldwell, 2013). Colubrid phylogeny has been recently studied at higher levels Additions to the phylogeny of colubrine snakes in Southwestern Asia, with description of a new genus and species (Serpentes: Colubridae: Colubrinae). One of the possible reasons is the absence of unsampled or undescribed taxa, hampering the estimation of a complete phylogeny (see Pyron, Burbrink & Wiens, 2013). This emphasizes the importance of studying the biodiversity of colubrid snakes, from a conservation point of view (Böhm et al, 2013), and to shed light on the phylogeny of the whole group
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