Hemipenial morphology of Epictia vellardi (Laurent, 1984) (Leptotyphlopidae, Serpentes) with the proposition and discuss
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Hemipenial morphology of Epictia vellardi (Laurent, 1984) (Leptotyphlopidae, Serpentes) with the proposition and discussion of two general hemipenial patterns within the genus Epictia Ana Carolina Ferreira1 · Julia Klaczko1 · Angele Martins1 Received: 3 July 2020 / Revised: 15 October 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Scolecophidia (Squamata, Serpentes), commonly known as blindsnakes, wormsnakes or threadsnakes comprises a group of small snakes, with relatively few systematic and morphological studies when compared to Alethinophidia. Since the external morphology is very conserved amongst scolecophidians, internal morphological studies—such as the hemipenial morphol‑ ogy—are useful to unravel several systematic issues within the group. We aimed to describe the hemipenial morphology of Epictia vellardi (Epictinae, Leptotyphlopidae) based on 16 organs belonging to eight specimens. The organ is unilobed, with the body conspicuously narrower than the base and with the apex slightly expanded, without any macroscopic orna‑ mentation. The comparison of the hemipenial morphology of E. vellardi with other hemipenes of Epictia spp. allowed us to identify two general morphological patterns for the genus, which are proposed and discussed in detail in the present study. The results found herein may be extremely relevant for future hemipenial descriptions. In addition, independent characters found in Types I and II (such as ornamentation, shape of base, body and apex) should be regarded for future systematic and evolutionary morphology studies within Leptotyphlopidae, in addition to assisting in the taxonomy and identification of species of the genus. Keywords Hemipenis · Ornamentation · Scolecophidia · Threadsnakes
Introduction Scolecophidia (sensu Miralles et al. 2018), commonly known as blindsnakes, wormsnakes or threadsnakes, consists of a group of snakes with relatively few studies (Francisco et al. 2018) regarding their evolution and natural history when compared to Alethinophidian snakes and, therefore, several issues related to its systematics still remain (Mez‑ zasalma et al. 2016). This taxon currently comprises about 440 species (Uetz et al. 2020) allocated in the family Lep‑ totyphlopidae (approx. 150 species) and in the superfamily Typhlopoidea (approx. 290 species) (Uetz et al. 2020). Morphological characters are so far the most common source of information applied as diagnostic features for taxa * Ana Carolina Ferreira [email protected] 1
Departamento de Ciências Fisiológicas, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro, Asa Norte, Brasília, Distrito Federal 70910‑900, Brazil
within Leptotyphlopidae (Francisco et al. 2018). However, the reduced size of individuals hampers the conduction of internal morphological studies, since most of those tech‑ niques demand invasive procedures to assess anatomical data. In addition, due to their fossorial habit, the re
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