Université de Fribourg

New material of Laophis crotaloides, an enigmatic giant snake from Greece, with an overview of the largest fossil European vipers

Georgalis, Georgios L. ; Szyndlar, Zbigniew ; Kear, Benjamin P. ; Delfino, Massimo

In: Swiss Journal of Geosciences, 2016, vol. 109, no. 1, p. 103–116

Laophis crotaloides was described by Richard Owen as a new and very large fossil viperid snake species from Greece. The type material is apparently lost and the taxon was mostly neglected for more than a century. We here describe a new partial viperid vertebra, collected from the same locality and of equivalent size to the type material. This vertebra indicates that at least one of the three...