My watch list
my.bionity.com  
Login  

Adder (snake)



  To many, the terms adder and "viper" are interchangeable, referring to any member of the Viperidae family. Although adder was more universally popular in the past, in the literature today it is still often used in combined names that refer to species belonging to the subfamily Viperinae (pitless vipers), especially those found in Europe and Africa. Only one species is still regularly referred to simply as "adder":

However, one other viper, a pitviper, has sometimes been referred to by that name:

There are, of course, always exceptions to the above rule:

  • Acanthophis sp., known as death adders, are not viperids at all, but elapids
  • Heterodon sp., or hognose snakes, are sometimes referred to as puff adders for their threat display, but are colubrids.

Etymology

The word "adder" was nædre in Old English; in the 14th century a nadder was, like a napron, rebracketed as an adder. It appears with the generic meaning of serpent in the older forms of many Germanic languages, and is thus used in the Old English version of the Christian Scriptures for the devil, the serpent of Genesis.

Cited references

  1. ^ Steward JW. 1971. The Snakes of Europe. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Press (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). 238 pp. LCCCN 77-163307. ISBN 0-8386-1023-4.
  2. ^ Street D. 1979. The Reptiles of Northern and Central Europe. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd. 268 pp. ISBN 0-7134-1374-3.
  3. ^ U.S. Navy. 1991. Poisonous Snakes of the World. US Govt. New York: Dover Publications Inc. 203 pp. ISBN 0-486-26629-X.
  4. ^ Wright AH, Wright AA. 1957. Handbook of Snakes. Comstock Publishing Associates. (7th printing, 1985). 1105 pp. ISBN 0-8014-0463-0.
* This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

See also

 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Adder_(snake)". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
Your browser is not current. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 does not support some functions on Chemie.DE