Basics of Snake Taxonomy

A while back, medical-doctor-turned-snake-blog-post-translator-extraordinaire1 Alvaro Permartin asked me to write an article covering basic snake taxonomy. Taxonomy is the branch of biology that deals with naming and classifying organisms. Biologists still use the Linnean hierarchical system for taxonomy, which is convenient for grouping organisms, but there is a move towards using phylogenetic systematics and the evolutionary species concept in taxonomy, particularly in the sense that recognizing and giving names to non-monophyletic groups is discouraged. Leer más.