Posted by:
conserve
at Mon Nov 24 11:10:36 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by conserve ]
I'm sorry to be blunt, but if you truely are a educated, professional geneticist, you should realize that you are offering a fairly uneducated argument. Morphological characters can be extremely plastic, and are only one part of the puzzle when looking at phylogeny. I'm guessing that you don't work with phylogentic analysis.
I'll cut you some slack since you said you have not thoroughly research the topic, but to make wild statements that a certain animal should be classified differently based on purely superficial observations is a bit hasty. I don't know much about death adders, I'm merely making a comment on your argument.
Some posters mentioned things like fixed front fangs and egg laying. Again, these are only part of the whole picture, and they are not black-and-white examples (there are a number of pit vipers that are egg layers). Morphology, genetics, behavior all come together to give a more complete picture.
The genetic data is pretty clear, at least as far as calling them elapids. Most evidence shows the Australian elapids to have diversified from an Asian elapid origin.
For some light bedtime reading see:
http://www.anu.edu.au/BoZo/Scott/PDF Files/1998.Keogh.ElapidWorld.pdf
http://biology.bangor.ac.uk/~bss166/Publications/2004_OzElapids_MPE.pdf
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RE: Death Adders are Elapids... WHY? - conserve, Mon Nov 24 11:10:36 2008