02/18/2024
These two separate clades of pythons, are known for their giants, but they both have smaller species/subspecies (depends who you ask), just to give you guys an outside perspective of these two clades, but still sticking with pythons. The short tail python clade, are broken up into four species (fully elevated species), but they are only 1.5% or 2% genetically divergent from each other, and inhabit less of a geographical range, than that of these two other species groups. Which begs the question, are there more than, just two or three species? That is for taxonomist to decide. I can have my opinion on what should be considered a species, but I am not a taxonomist. A lot can cause speciation events such as climates or environment, mountains, for example, can be a huge reasoning for speciation events. Some of these mountains can be tens of millions of years old, and to have animals on both sides of a mountain for that period of time will cause evolutionary variance.
This post was made from an article about the Eunectes murinus being broken into two separate species. If you looked at the other members of the family Boidae group like Boa & Corallus that share the same geographical ranges as murinus it seems a bit more logical that they would also be more then one species.
