Firstly, I misspoke in my original message. I meant to say that Lampropeltis is descended from a species of Elaphe which migrated from the Old World to the New. This fact has been known for decades among herpetologists who are aware of Dowling et al.'s immunological data published in 1983 in the Journal of Zoology. Even without knowing Dowling et al.'s paper, it is still common knowledge among herpetologists that Lampropeltis is derived from Elaphe on the basis of morphology. Therefore there is no excuse for choosing Lampropeltis as the outgroup in analyzing relationships among European species of Elaphe. The same mistake, as I said in my original post, can still be made if one adopts Utiger et al.'s proposal to split Elaphe into a dozen or so different contrived genera, since Lampropeltis would still be a valid genus under Utiger et al.'s proposed classification.

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