Keywords: Aesculapian snake; Zamenis longissimus; ancient DNA; relics; DNA preservation; museum specimens; phylogeography 1. Introduction Collections of biological specimens represent an essential resource for studying biodiversity on our planet. Over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that ...
The Aesculapian snake (Zamenis longissimus) is distributed in Central and Southern Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and Iran, but had a wider mid-Holocene distribution into Northern Europe. To investigate the genetic affinity of a Danish population that we