Anne-Sophie Delmas's research while affiliated with Institut de Génétique Humaine and other places

... In snakes of the clade Afrophidia (the clade that is phylogenetically bracketed by the boa and python clade and the clade Caenophidia-see Vidal et al., 2007), males engage in a combat ritual that often involves combatants coiling around each other and raising their foreparts, with each combatant attempting to push the other's foreparts down (Carpenter, 1977;Senter et al., 2014;Abu Baker et al., 2021;Senter, 2022). Detailed descriptions of male-male combat (MMC) have been published for numerous snake species (reviewed in Carpenter, 1977;Shine, 1978Shine, , 1994Senter et al., 2014;Abu Baker et al., 2021;Senter, 2022), but the number of loops in the coil is usually not reported. ...

... In addition to the strong mitochondrial DNA support, there is a well-established pattern of the presence of sister species with northern and southern distributions on the continent. These include lizards of the genus Tupinambis, with T. cryptus occupying a distribution similar to the northern species and other species in the south [97]; Dracaena, with D. guianensis in the north and D. paraguayensis in the south [98,99]; matamata turtles with Chelus orinocensis in the north and C. fimbriata in the south [100]; Red-headed Amazon River turtles (Podocnemis erythrocephala) [101]; the arboreal boas Corallus with C. ruschenbergerii in the north and others to the south [102,103]; boas of the genus Epicrates with E. maurus in the north and the other lineages in the south [104]. While there may not be a clear barrier separating the northern clades from the southern species today, these patterns likely speak to paleogeographic events that produced this split at the continental scale in a variety of taxa (see below). ...

... New Cytb and CR sequences were also obtained for two individuals of the long-nosed mongoose. The GenBank sequences were from Palomares et al. 2002;Yoder et al. 2003;Gaubert et al. 2004;Veron et al. 2004;Koepfli et al. 2006;Markotter et al. 2006;Perez et al. 2006;Morley et al. 2007;Dehghani et al. 2008;Fernandes et al. 2008;Patou et al. 2009;Fernandes 2011;Gaubert et al. 2011;Rapson et al. 2012;Sonet et al. 2014;Veron et al. 2015a; Barros et al. 2016;Hassanin and Veron 2016;Gryseels et al. 2020. ...

... On the other hand, the tropidophiid-caenophidian sister-group relationship hypothesized by Zaher (1994b) was not retrieved in Wilcox et al.'s analyses (but see White et al., 2004), with tropidophiids rather emerging as an early diverging alethinophidian lineage. Except for White et al. (2004), this surprising molecular result was consistently retrieved shortly after in a series of molecular studies on higher-snake relationships, with tropidophiids often clustering as the sister-group of South American Aniliidae (Slowinski & Lawson, 2002;Vidal & David, 2004;Vidal & Hedges, 2002) in a clade named Amerophidia Vidal et al., 2007. Recent largescale molecular phylogenies reinforced the previously unexpected sister-group relationship between tropidophiids and aniliids, with high statistical support in all studies (Burbrink et al., 2020;Streicher & Wiens, 2017;Zheng & Wiens, 2016). ...