Digest: Massive mixing and merging of Madagascar Gemsnakes

Introgressive hybridization can give rise to reticulated patterns in a phylogeny. In a recent study, DeBaun et al. detected 12 reticulation events across the phylogeny of the Madagascar Gemsnakes, suggesting that their evolutionary history cannot be captured in a bifurcating tree. Moreover, identifying the true network of a group is difficult when using only available extant data. The evolution of these snakes might thus be even more tangled than we currently think.