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" When the cobra runs for her life , she goes like a whiplash flicked across a sawbuck ’s neck , " Rudyard Kipling write of the nefarious cobra Nagaina in his narration of the heroic mongoose Rikki - Tiki - Tavi . And this lash motion may have aid real - spirit cobras and their congeneric spread from Asia , where they originated , to the rest of the world .
scientist once conceive that Elapoidea , the superfamily containing cobras , coral snakes and mamba , originated in Africa . A fossil of a file snakefound in Tanzaniaand see to the Oligocene Epoch ( 33.9 million to 23 million years ago ) supported this hypothesis — it is the honest-to-goodness relation of this group bring out in the fogy record .
But in new research , print Aug. 7 in the journalRoyal Society Open Science , researchers used genic analysis and fossils from other part to conclude that these snakes , as well as serpent in the related superfamily Colubroidea , in reality originated in Asia .
" The cause for the uncertainty was mostly because of the lack of understanding of how these different species are related to one another , " direct authorJeffrey Weinell , an evolutionary biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History , who conduct the research while at the University of Kansas , told Live Science .
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Scientists had never collect comprehensive genetic information on the group before , he explain . " I was interested in inferring the tree of life for this group , which presage the evolutionary relationship , and then using that tree of life estimation plus information about New metal money to estimate where the ancestor of this group dwell , " he added .
In the new study , Weinell and colleagues analyse 3,128 locations on the genomes of 65 species of Elapoidea to decode how all the snake were related . They also included additional data from 434 other coinage , some of which had already been compiled in genetic databases and some of which they sampled themselves . These specie were then mapped to depict their historical geographic distribution .
They establish that the earliest ancestors of Elapoidea develop in Asia between 28.94 and 45.92 million class ago and that Colubroidea emerged some 31.13 to 48.81 million age ago .
These former Asian ancestors may not exist in the fogy criminal record due to the shape where they evolved . " Tropical Asia is not the near for preserving fossils because of the climate , " Weinell said .
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These snakes left Asia for Africa , between 37.5 million , at the earliest , and 24.4 years ago and their descendants then dispersed into Europe , Australasia and the Americas in multiple waves . There are now 700 species , on every continent except Antarctica and many island as well . Even the ocean have been colonized by these former snakes ' descendant .
The study found these snake had a involved evolutionary story . Elapoids and colubroids in all probability moved into Africa from Asia on at least 15 different occasions , for good example . And they recolonized Asia from Africa at least seven times , indicate the complexness of their movement between landmasses and emphasise the difficultness of tracing their pedigree .
As to how they acquire from one continent to the other , Weinell suspects that these Hydra may have taken a variety of paths — using land bridgework and even crossing narrow nautical transition , to achieve their spheric distribution today .
