Beneath the visible diversity of India's spectacled cobra — its shifting colors, markings, and venoms across a vast subcontinent — science has uncovered a profound genetic unity. Researchers at Kolkata's Evolutionary Venomics Lab, sequencing nearly a hundred snakes across India's major biogeographical zones, found that mainland cobras form a single, interbreeding population whose ancestors arrived not from Asia, as once believed, but from Africa during the Miocene epoch. This discovery is not merely taxonomic; with nearly 58,000 snakebite deaths in India each year, understanding the cobra's ge
Indian cobras genetically uniform despite visible differences, study finds
Spectacled cobras are responsible for approximately 58,000 snakebite deaths annually in India.