Xuming Lü¹ , Xuezhong Zhang²

1 Institute of Life Sciences, Jiyang Colloge of Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China
2 Animal Science Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572026, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Super Species Research, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 1   
Received: 18 Nov., 2024    Accepted: 25 Dec., 2024    Published: 07 Jan., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This study summarizes the origin, global geographical spread, and ecological adaptive evolution of snakes, and explores the molecular basis and typical cases of these adaptive evolutions. The study shows that snakes originated from Mesozoic lizard ancestors, and a small burrowing lifestyle may be a characteristic of early snakes. After the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, snakes rapidly radiated from a few surviving ancestors and spread geographically to all parts of the world. In this process, snakes evolved unique morphological and physiological adaptations, such as slender limbless bodies, flexible skull structures, and diverse venoms, to occupy diverse ecosystems. Molecular evolution studies have revealed that a series of genomic changes, such as limb degeneration, visual and sensory organ reorganization, and toxin gene expansion, are involved in the adaptive evolution of snakes. By analyzing the adaptive evolution of sea snakes, desert snakes, and arboreal snakes through typical cases, it is demonstrated how environmental selection shapes the morphological functions of snakes. In the future, new technologies combining fossil records, comparative genomics, and ecological monitoring will further deepen the understanding of the adaptive evolutionary mechanisms of snakes and provide new ideas for biological evolution theory and species protection.

Snakes; Evolutionary origin; Geographical dispersal; Ecological adaptation; Molecular basis