Post #2698909
2026-05-13 21:17 UTC
Replies (2)
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@datarama@hachyderm.io 2026-05-13 21:40
Which of the following pairs of animals are more closely related?
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@datarama@hachyderm.io 2026-05-14 23:19
Surprisingly perhaps, this would be the boa constrictor and the chameleon. Both belong to the group Toxicofera, together with all iguanids, snakes, monitors and agamids - including the bearded dragon, in fact. All venomous reptiles belong to this clade - although plenty of nonvenomous ones also do. Venom is not an ancestral trait to the group, but it seems the anatomical elements necessary for producing venom are. Skinks are not toxicoferans (although some of them look *a lot* more like snakes than chameleons do!), and in fact they're one of the two weird outlier groups of the lizard family tree - only geckos are even more distantly related to everyone else than skinks are. (However, bearded dragons and blue-tongue skinks are closely related in the sense that both are Australian reptiles widely considered absolutely cute.)