"They say that all lampropeltinine snakes crossed into the americas from the bering land bridge during a temperate period some 16-22 million years ago"



Where did you get this? Did that bridge even exist 16 mya? I dont have time to investigate this, but the version of this prehistory that I read, and cant recall when and where I read it, was that ancestral lampropeltinines existed in Laurasia (the supercontinent consisting of NA and Europe and Asia). I believe that when NA and Europe separated, the split line was along eastern NA and western Europe, so there could not have been a Bering Strait at that time (I have no idea how many mya that was, but it was probably more than 22 mya. That long ago, its unlikely that whatever the ancestral Lampropeltinines were, they probably were different species, if not genera that exist today, and may have not even resembled anything existing forms today.

What ever the forms were that existed at that time, they probably did not include Lampropeltis and Pituophis. It's my understanding that some form of NA ratsnake was ancestral to Pits and Kings and this occurred after the continents separated so I would suspect that there cannot be any Pits or King relatives in Europe or Asia. Any resemblance of european or asian Lampropeltines to NA pits and kings is probably due to convergent evolution to similar niches. With all of the molecular genetics studies that have occurred recently that resulted in the taxonomic revisions of numerous general and species complexes, I would assume if there were genetic relationships between NA Pits and Kings to any European and Asian form, it will eventually be proven in the Laboratory. That is just off of the top of my head.













This includes pituophis. Since there are old world "rat snakes" and even candidates for old world lampropeltis (Coronella) I'm going to pick your brain and ask what old world snakes resemble our pituophis and might they be related? I'll start with a couple:

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