Toxicofera

Toxicoferans; Temporal range:
	Venomous snakes, such as the rattlesnake shown above, are the best-known venomous squamates
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Reptilia
Order:	Squamata
Clade:	Toxicofera; Vidal & Hedges, 2005
Subgroups
	Anguimorpha; Iguania; Ophidia; †Mosasauria; †Polyglyphanodontia?;
Synonyms
	Pythonomorpha?

Toxicofera (Greek for "those who bear toxins") is a proposed clade of scaled reptiles (squamates) that includes the Serpentes (snakes), Anguimorpha (monitor lizards, gila monster, and alligator lizards) and Iguania (iguanas, agamas, and chameleons). Toxicofera contains about 4,600 species, (nearly 60%) of extant Squamata.^[2] It encompasses all venomous reptile species, as well as numerous related non-venomous species. There is little morphological evidence to support this grouping; however, it has been recovered by all molecular analyses as of 2012.^[3]^[4]^[5]^{[needs update]}

^ Marjanović, D. (2021). "The Making of Calibration Sausage Exemplified by Recalibrating the Transcriptomic Timetree of Jawed Vertebrates". Frontiers in Genetics. 12. 521693. doi:10.3389/fgene.2021.521693. PMC 8149952. PMID 34054911.
^ Fry, Bryan G.; Vidal, Nicolas; Norman, Janette A.; Vonk, Freek J.; Scheib, Holger; Ramjan, S. F. Ryan; Kuruppu, Sanjaya; Fung, Kim; Blair Hedges, S.; Richardson, Michael K.; Hodgson, Wayne. C.; Ignjatovic, Vera; Summerhayes, Robyn; Kochva, Elazar (2005). "Early evolution of the venom system in lizards and snakes". Nature. 439 (7076): 584–8. Bibcode:2006Natur.439..584F. doi:10.1038/nature04328. PMID 16292255. S2CID 4386245.
^ Vidal, Nicolas; Hedges, S. Blair (2009). "The molecular evolutionary tree of lizards, snakes, and amphisbaenians". Comptes Rendus Biologies. 332 (2–3): 129–39. doi:10.1016/j.crvi.2008.07.010. PMID 19281946. S2CID 23137302.
^ Pyron, R.; Burbrink, Frank T.; Wiens, John J. (2013). "A phylogeny and revised classification of Squamata, including 4161 species of lizards and snakes". BMC Evolutionary Biology. 13: 93. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-13-93. PMC 3682911. PMID 23627680.
^ Wiens, J. J.; Hutter, C. R.; Mulcahy, D. G.; Noonan, B. P.; Townsend, T. M.; Sites, J. W.; Reeder, T. W. (2012). "Resolving the phylogeny of lizards and snakes (Squamata) with extensive sampling of genes and species". Biology Letters. 8 (6): 1043–6. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2012.0703. PMC 3497141. PMID 22993238.