An it didn’t conform to any normal habits of the creatures, either burrowing, or climbing, or whatever. I mean, it did all sorts of things in its enclosure, which wasn’t overly furnished in terms of apparatus like tree branches and so on. But at any rate, this colorful creature died, and I took it down to the museum, and that led to some investigations that I was already attracted to with the associate curator Hymen Marx who worked alongside Bob Inger at Field Museum. So this led to an enormous investigation in terms of the characteristics that we used to define species, the morphological characteristics. At the time, we didn’t have the capacity to do any of the genetical work, but this led to a truly major publication on the morphological characteristics of snakes. But the Azemiops led to a particular revelation with Carl Liam who went from Field Museum to Harvard. He died a couple of years ago, but Carl and Hy Marx and I really worked on the relationships of Azemiops. And it turns out that this creature sort of speaks straddley the phylogenetic position between the viperine snakes of the old world and the crotaline, the rattle snakes, and relatives, in the new world.
