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.