Alethinophidia
Searched as Alethinophidia indet.. The Paleobiology Database treats Alethinophidia as the accepted name.
The Alethinophidia are an infraorder of snakes that includes all snakes other than blind snakes and thread snakes. Snakes have long been grouped into families within Alethinophidia based on their morphology, especially that of their teeth. More modern phylogenetic hypotheses using genetic data support the recognition of 19 extant families, although the taxonomy of alethinophidian snakes has long been debated, and ultimately the decision whether to assign a particular clade to a particular Linnaean rank is arbitrary.

Uncredited · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- SerpentesPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Amniota
Time the record covers
At least 65 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 774 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 72.2 Mya to 129 ka.
15 occurrences of Alethinophidia on record, most of them in the Eocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
15 occurrences- Late Cretaceous20%
- Paleocene9%
- Eocene31%
- Oligocene7%
- Miocene13%
- Pliocene13%
- Pleistocene7%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
11 formations
- Socorro Formation1
- La Posa Formation · Tremp Group1
- Lance Formation1
- Nsungwe Formation · Red Sandstone Group1
- Devil's Graveyard Formation1
- Hainin Formation1
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The named rock units Alethinophidia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 4 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Alethinophidia and its relatives
EoceneWhere Alethinophidia and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
4,463 taxa- Rana42 sites
- Boidae33 sites
- Anura25 sites
- Bufo25 sites
- Colubridae25 sites
- Serpentes24 sites
- Trionychidae24 sites
- Equus22 sites
- Thamnophis22 sites
- Crotalus21 sites
- Viperidae21 sites
- Amphisbaenidae19 sites
- Geochelone19 sites
- Ophisaurus19 sites
- Aves18 sites
- Colubrinae18 sites
- Natricinae18 sites
- Elaphe17 sites
- Lepisosteus17 sites
- Hipparion15 sites
- Hyla15 sites
- Osteichthyes15 sites
- Gekkonidae14 sites
- Lampropeltis getulus14 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 724 sites for Alethinophidia, and this reads 240 of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
15 references- First fossil frog and snake assemblage from southern Taiwan: a window into Pleistocene herpetofauna and palaeoenvironments in subtropical East Asia1
- Southernmost lepidosaur (Reptilia) assemblage from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia1
- A new window to the fossil herpetofauna of India: amphibians and snakes from the Miocene localities of Kutch (Gujarat)1
- A Pliocene–Pleistocene continental biota from Venezuela1
- Latest Early-early Middle Eocene deposits of Algeria (Glib Zegdou, HGL50), yield the richest and most diverse fauna of amphibians and squamate reptiles from the Palaeogene of Africa1
- A South American snake lineage from the Eocene Greenhouse of North America and a reappraisal of the fossil record of “anilioid” snakes1
- Amphibians and reptiles from the late Miocene and early Pliocene of the Ptolemais area (Western Macedonia, Greece)1
- The first amphisbaenians from Texas, with notes on other squamates from the middle Eocene Purple Bench locality1
- The Earliest Colubroid-Dominated Snake Fauna from Africa: Perspectives from the Late Oligocene Nsungwe Formation of Southwestern Tanzania1
- Mass extinction of lizards and snakes at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary1
- Amphibians and squamate reptiles from the latest Maastrichtian (Upper Cretaceous) of Blasi 2 (Huesca, Spain)1
- Fossil snakes from the Neogene of Venezuela (Falcón State).1
Each of the 15 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 3 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Alethinophidia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Alethinophidia was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itSerpentes through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Nopcsa 1923)