Hydrophiinae
Hydrophiinae is a subfamily of venomous snakes in the family Elapidae. It contains most sea snakes and many genera of venomous land snakes found in Australasia, such as the taipans (Oxyuranus), tiger snakes (Notechis), brown snakes (Pseudonaja) and death adders (Acanthophis).

Will Brown · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- sea snakePBDB
- Sits inside
- ElapidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Elapidae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Elapidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Amniota
Time the record covers
At most 8.8 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 15.98 Mya and 7.246 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
7 occurrences of Hydrophiinae on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
7 occurrences- Miocene100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Hydrophiinae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Hydrophiinae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
48 taxa- Chiroptera2 sites
- Dipnoi2 sites
- Incongruelaps iteratus2 sites
- Morelia riversleighensis2 sites
- Pseudocheiridae2 sites
- Testudines2 sites
- Anura1 site
- Aves1 site
- Burramys brutyi1 site
- Dasyuridae1 site
- Egernia1 site
- Ekaltadeta ima1 site
- Ekaltadeta jamiemulvaneyi1 site
- Ganbulanyi1 site
- Ganguroo1 site
- Gastropoda1 site
- Hadronomas1 site
- Hipposideridae1 site
- Lechriodus intergerivus1 site
- Leptodactylidae1 site
- Macroderma1 site
- Macropodidae1 site
- Malleodectes1 site
- Mayigriphus orbus1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Hydrophiinae, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
2 references- Mid-Tertiary elapid snakes (Squamata, Colubroidea) from Riversleigh, northern Australia: early steps in a continent-wide adaptive radiation6
- A New, Giant Platypus, Obdurodon tharalkooschild, sp. nov. (Monotremata, Ornithorhynchidae), from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Australia1
Each of the 7 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Hydrophiinae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Will Brown
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Hydrophiinae was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itElapidae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Boié 1827)