Re: PYTHONOMORPHA REVISITED

["Tony Canning" <tonyc@foe.co.uk>]

On Feb 7, 11:20am, Adam Yates wrote:

> The interesting thing about Lee's phylogeny is that it turns all those
> funny little burrowing snakes into a monophyletic group, rather than a
> paraphyletic grade of basal snakes as in past hypotheses. This of course
> suggests two things 1) a fossorial phase in early snake evolution is less
> likely & 2) The characters shared between the fossorial snakes and
> amphisbaenids are not necessarily primitive for snakes. Indeed I suspect
> a fossorial existance places quite an evolutionary "straight jacket" on
> lepidosaur groups creating quite an impressive set of convergences.

Has anybody seen the recent work describing supposed ancestral snakes
(from Israel, I think) which were aquatic?  I've seen a brief summary but
not the original research..

Tony Canning
tonyc@foe.co.uk