Israeli Researcher Identifies “New” Snake Family

By Ariel Grossman, NoCamels March 02, 2023 2 minutes

The Micrelaps muelleri, a species of venomous rear-fanged snake belonging to the newly-named Micrelapidae family. Courtesy

A new family of snakes, dating back 50 million years, has been identified by researchers in Israel.

They say three species of snake, found in Israel, Kenya and Tanzania, are members of the newly-named Micrelapidae family.

Until now, they’d been considered as members of the largest family, the Colubridae, but multiple DNA tests over the last decade contradicted this.

Snake researchers tried to understand which family they belonged to, but with no success.

The new family of snakes are characterized by scales with black and yellow rings.

They emerged from the evolutionary tree of snakes about 50 million years ago. Since then, these snakes have evolved independently as a distinct and separate family.

Researchers including Prof. Shai Meiri, of Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology, used high-resolution magnetic imaging to examine the snake’s morphology, focusing specifically on the skull, and applied methods of deep genomic sequencing to come to the conclusion.

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter

As far as they know, the new family includes only three species, one of which resides in Israel and nearby regions (northern Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, southern Syria, and southern Lebanon). The other two species can be found in Kenya and Tanzania, in East Africa.

“Today we tend to assume that most large groups of animals, such as families, are already known to science, but sometimes we still encounter surprises, and this is what happened with Micrelapid snakes,” said Prof. Meiri.

“In this study we were able to describe a new snake family – the Micrelapidae. Even though these snakes have been known for decades, they were mistakenly included in other families for many years.

“Since most animals have already been classified into well-defined families, such a discovery of a new family is quite a rare occurrence in modern science.”

The study was conducted by researchers from Finland, the USA, Belgium, Madagascar, Hong Kong, and Israel. The paper is published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.