Booidea Gray, 1825 (sensu Burbrink et al. 2020)

General information.

Until relatively recently Booidea included both boas and pythons, but it is currently restricted only to boas and their closest relatives, i.e., the families Calabariidae, Sanziniidae, Boidae, Candoiidae, Erycidae, Charinaidae, and Ungaliophiidae (Pyron et al. 2014; Reynolds and Henderson 2018; Burbrink et al. 2020; Georgalis and Smith 2020; Scanferla and Smith 2020b; see above Table 1). They have a rather disjunct geographic distribution, scattered across the Americas, Africa, Madagascar, Eastern Europe, Asia, and certain Pacific Islands (Pyron et al. 2014; Reynolds and Henderson 2018). Their fossil record attests an even wider distribution, achieving a remarkable diversity during the Paleogene (Rage 1984; Szyndlar and Rage 2003; Head et al. 2009; Georgalis et al. 2021a; Smith and Georgalis 2022), including also astonishingly preserved skeletons (Szyndlar and Böhme 1996; Baszio 2004; Scanferla et al. 2016; Smith and Scanferla 2016, 2021; Scanferla and Smith 2020a, 2020b; Georgalis et al. 2021a; Chuliver et al. 2022), spectacular mummified trunk portions (Rochebrune 1884; Georgalis et al. 2021a), as well as the largest, so far, known snake of all time, Titanoboa Head et al., 2009, from the Paleocene of Colombia (Head et al. 2009).