Candoiidae Pyron, Reynolds & Burbrink, 2014, 1830

Szyndlar, Zbigniew & Georgalis, Georgios L., 2023, An illustrated atlas of the vertebral morphology of extant non-caenophidian snakes, with special emphasis on the cloacal and caudal portions of the column, Vertebrate Zoology 73, pp. 717-886 : 717

Candoiidae Pyron, Reynolds & Burbrink, 2014

General information.

This group of island boas comprises a single genus, Candoia , with five known species, distributed across several islands of the Pacific Ocean ( Pyron et al. 2014). No fossil record is as yet known; only a few archaeozoological remains from New Caledonia exist ( Daza et al. 2021).

Vertebral morphology of Candoiidae is generally similar to that of other booids, but they can be readily differentiated from other booids by the continuous presence of hypapophyses throughout the trunk (for more details, see Description and figures of Candoia below).

Previous figures of vertebrae of extant Candoiidae have been so far presented only by Gasc (1974), Underwood (1976), and Frýdlová et al. (2023). Among these, vertebrae from the cloacal and/or caudal series of candoiids have never been figured so far, with the exception of a single μCT image of an articulated skeleton in Frýdlová et al. (2023). Besides this previous figuring, several authors observed the presence of hypapophyses throughout the trunk portion of the column in Candoia ( Hoffstetter and Gasc 1969; Malnate 1972; McDowell 1975; Rage 1984; Szyndlar and Böhme 1996; Szyndlar and Rage 2003).