Uropeltoidea Mueller , 1831, 2007

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

Uropeltoidea Mueller, 1831

General information.

Once placed along with Anilius , into an expanded, paraphyletic, concept of Anilioidea . However, recent phylogenetic analyses have instead recovered Anilius to be lying much more distantly, closer to the base of alethinophidians (see above). Uropeltoidea thus includes Uropeltidae , Cylindrophiidae , and Anomochilidae , all fossorial snakes, currently confined to Southern Asia ( Gower et al. 2005). A fossil record is so far totally absent for uropeltoids, a rather frustrating fact, especially when considering that recent divergence date estimates suggested that Uropeltoidea split off during the Late Cretaceous ( Cyriac and Kodandaramaiah 2017; Burbrink et al. 2020). The spellings Uropeltacea, Uropelta, Uropeltana, Uropeltina, and Uropeltiens have also been applied for this grouping during the 19th century (e.g., Müller 1831; Bonaparte 1845, 1852; Jan 1857, 1865; Peters 1861), while Cope (1898) applied the name Rhinophiidae for uropeltids. Interestingly, Gray (1845) treated uropeltids as lizards.

Generally, vertebrae of Uropeltoidea are characterized by high-angled prezygapophyses (an average of>24°), neural spine lamina absent or greatly reduced, spine restricted to posterior edge of neural arch resulting in a saddle-shaped dorsal margin of the neural arch, and depressed neural arch with a shallow concave posteromedian notch.