Rubber Boas Charina   Gray, 1849
A juvenile specimen of C. umbratica from Riverside County, California Image © Michael Rochford, 2005
Taxonomic Comments:
Kluge (1993 Calabaria and the phylogeny of erycine snakes. Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society 107: 293-351) synonymized the genus Lichanura with the genus Charina. Powell, Collins and Hooper (1998 A Key to the Amphibians and Reptiles of the Continental United States and Canada. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence. vi + 131 pp.) adopted the conclusion of Kluge (1993), and considered all U. S. taxa to belong to a single genus Charina. Rodriguez-Robles, Bell and Greene (1999 Journal of the Zoological Society of London 248: 49-58) recognized the species trivirgata as a member of the genus Charina. McDiarmid, Campbell & Touré (1999. Snakes Species of the World. Volume 1. Herpetologists League, Washington, D.C.) agreed with the earlier conclusion of Kluge (1993) that synonymized the genus Lichanura with the genus Charina. Vidal & Hedges (2002 Higher-level relationships of snakes inferred from four nuclear and mitochondrial genes. Comptes Rendus Biologies 325: 977-985) resurrected the genus Lichanura, returning the taxonomy of these boids to the way it was prior to Kluge (1993). (CNAH Note: This change was reached by inference from the paper by Vidal & Hedges -- nowhere is this proposed taxonomic change explicitly stated in their article). Noonan, Brice P. & Paul T. Chippindale (2006. Dispersal and vicariance: The complex evolutionary history of boid snakes. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 40: pp. 347-358) followed Vidal & Hedges (2002) in resurrecting the genus Lichanura for the species trivirgata. Henderson, Robert W. & Robert Powell (2007. Biology of the Boas and Pythons. Eagle Mountain Publishing, Eagle Mountain, Utah. x + 438 pp.) followed Vidal & Hedges (2002) in resurrecting the genus Lichanura for the species trivirgata.