Dr Chris Kelly, a National Research Foundation Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University, was recently honoured with the 2010 Joseph B. Slowinski Award for excellence in snake systematics.?

Dr Kelly is currently conducting his research with Professor Nigel Barker’s Molecular Ecology & Systematics Group, which incorporates the Great Escarpment Biodiversity Research Programme in the Rhodes University Botany Department.

The Slowinski Award was established in 2002 by The Centre for North American Herpetology (CNAH) and is awarded annually to the biologist that published the premier scientific paper on snake systematics. It commemorates one of the world’s leading herpetologists, Joseph Bruno Slowinski, the curator of amphibians, reptiles, turtles, and crocodiles at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who died in the jungles of Burma in 2001 from a venomous snakebite.

Published in the journal Cladistics, Dr Kelly’s paper entitled “Phylogeny, Biogeography and Classification of the Snake Superfamily Elapoidea: A Rapid Radiation of the Late Eocene” is considered the most distinguished paper on snake systematics to appear worldwide during 2009.

The paper dealt with evolutionary relationships of a large, globally-distributed group of snakes including many of the best-known venomous snake species such as cobras, mambas, sea snakes, coral snakes; most of the Madagascan snakes; and a fair proportion of the African snake diversity. This group experienced a very rapid diversification from a single ancestral population in Africa, around 40 million years ago, making it exceedingly difficult to work out the exact pattern of evolutionary relationships between families.

The paper put forward an updated classification system for the superfamily, including the creation of a new family for Shovel-Snout snakes and inferred how and when the different families produced by this rapid radiation had dispersed across the globe.

The paper was co-authored with Professor Barker, the current Head of the Botany Department; Professor of Entomology, Martin Villet; and Dr Donald Broadley, the former curator of herpetology at the National Museum of Zimbabwe, author of the definitive text on southern African snakes, and currently affiliated to the Biodiversity Foundation for Africa.

Dr Kelly’s interest in snakes was first sparked at the age of three and by the time he was seven he had begun catching and keeping live snakes. Despite his lifelong dedication to the study of snakes, receipt of the award came as a total surprise: “In my own research over the years I’ve made extensive use of Joe Slowinski’s publications,” he said. “It has been a long-term goal of mine to make a significant intellectual contribution to the field of herpetology, and for me, the award is an indicator that by God’s grace, this goal is being fulfilled.”

Having completed his doctorate on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Dr Kelly returned to Rhodes, his alma mater, in 2007 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. His research interests centre on understanding the diversity of snakes, their accurate classification and the conservation of this diversity.

Dr Kelly is currently focused on a charismatic little venomous snake called the Berg Adder, which occurs as a series of isolated populations on the mountains of southern Africa. “We’ve discovered that the ‘Berg Adder’ is actually made up of several separate, isolated species, and we’re now working to understand when and how these species may have arisen, and how their fragmented distribution pattern came about,” he said.