Table 1.
Voucher numbers, localities, and GenBank accession numbers for genetic samples.
DRC = Democratic Republic of the Congo; RC = Republic of Congo; SA = South Africa; GNP = herpetological collection of the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Center, Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Other collection acronyms are explained in Sabaj [108]. Note that Lawson et al. [109] erroneously listed the specimen of Atractaspis sp. as MVZ 228653.
Fig 1.
Map of sub-Saharan Africa and western Asia/Middle East, showing sampling localities for atractaspidines used in this study.
Fig 2.
Maximum-likelihood phylogeny of Atractaspidinae with combined 16S, ND4, cyt b, c-mos, and RAG1 data sets.
Closed circles denote clades with Bayesian posterior probability values ≥ 0.95. Diamonds denote clades with strong support in both maximum likelihood analyses (values ≥ 70) and Bayesian analyses (posterior probability values ≥ 0.95).
Table 2.
Primers used for sequencing mitochondrial and nuclear genes.
Fig 3.
Maximum-likelihood phylogeny of Atractaspidinae and Aparallactinae with combined 16S, ND4, cyt b, c-mos, and RAG1 data sets.
Diamonds denote clades with maximum likelihood values ≥ 70 and Bayesian posterior probability values ≥ 0.95; closed circles denote clades with Bayesian posterior probability values ≥ 0.95.
Fig 4.
Phylogeny resulting from BEAST, based on four calibration points.
Nodes with high support (posterior probability ≥ 0.95) are denoted by black circles. Median age estimates are provided along with error bars representing the 95% highest posterior densities (HPD) (Table 3).
Table 3.
Estimated dates and 95% highest posterior densities (HPD) of main nodes.
Node labels correspond to those in Fig 4.
Fig 5.
Computed tomography (CT) scans of aparallactine and atractaspidine genera.
Homoroselaps lacteus (CAS 173258) (A); Atractaspis bibronii (CAS 111670) (B); Chilorhinophis gerardi (CAS 159106) (C); Polemon christyi (CAS 147905) (D); Aparallactus niger (AMNH 142406) (E); Aparallactus modestus (CAS 111865) (F); Aparallactus capensis (G); Macrelaps microlepidotus (H); Amblyodipsas polylepis (CAS 173555) (I); Xenocalamus bicolor (CAS 248601) (J).
Fig 6.
Ancestral-state reconstructions with ML optimization on the ML trees from the concatenated analyses shown in Fig 2.
(A) fang morphology, (B) dietary preference. Aparallactus 1 = A. niger; Aparallactus 2 = A. modestus; Aparallactus 3 = A. capensis, A. cf. capensis, A. guentheri, A. jacksonii, A. lunulatus, and A. werneri; Amblyodipsas 1 = A. concolor; Amblyodipsas 2 = A. dimidiata, A. polylepis, and A. unicolor; Amblyodipsas 3 = A. ventrimaculata; Amblyodipsas 4 = A. microphthalma.