Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to the late William (Bill) R Branch who sadly passed away while this paper was in preparation and in honour of his great contributions to Angolan and African herpetofauna we name one of the new Angolan species after him. We thank Ivan Ineich and Nicolas Vidal (MNHN), MO Rödel and Frank Tillack (ZMB), Colin McCarthy (BMNH), Wolfgang Böhme and Ulla Bott (ZFMK), Michael Franzen (ZSM), Phillippe Geniez (BEV, CNRS), Lauren Scheinberg (CAS), Andreas Schlüter (SMNS), Ilunga André (MD) for loan of material and assistance during visiting the collections. Many thanks to Patrick Campbell (BMNH) and Nicolas Vidal (MNHN) for information and photos on specimens in their care. Ralph Hörold, Rüdiger Schlepper, and Mirko Barts provided tissue for DNA analyses. We thank Marco Neiber (Cenak) and Mathew Heinicke (University of Michigan-Dearborn) for extracting the DNA from different tissues. We thank Eli Greenbaum and O Mediannikov for providing DNA sequences of Boaedon from their analyses. RE thanks T Lautenschläger and C Neinhuis (TU Dresden) and MF Branquima (Uni Kimpa Vita). The present work results from fieldwork of three independent teams: RE fieldwork was supported by a grant from the Paul-Ungerer-Stiftung. Research and export permits were issued by the appropriate Angolan authorities to the different teams involved in this paper: For Raffael Ernst, permission to conduct biodiversity research in Angola and to export specimens was granted by the former director (Soki Kuedikuenda) of the Instituto Nacional da Biodiversidade e Áreas de Conservação, Ministério do Ambiente, República de Angola, under permission number 122/INBAC.MINAMB/2013. For Luis MP Ceríaco, Mariana P Marques and Aaron Bauer, permission to conduct biodiversity research in Angola and to export specimens was granted by the former (Abias Huongo) and current (Aristófanes Pontes) directors of the Instituto Nacional da Biodiversidade e Áreas de Conservação, Ministério do Ambiente, República de Angola, under the permits 227/INBAC.MINAMB/2016, 155/INBAC.MINAMB/2017, 075/INBAC.MINAMB/2019. Fieldwork assistance was provided by Suzana Bandeira, Hilária Valério, Joyce Janota, Timóteo Júlio, Brett Butler, Ishan Agarwal and Alvaro Baptista and his family. LMPC and AMB were supported by grants DEB-1556255, 1556585, 1556559, and EF-1241885 (subaward 13-0632) from the National Science Foundation of the United States, and by a grant to AMB and David Blackburn from the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. MPM is currently supported by FCT, contract SFRH/BD/129924/2017. For Werner Conradie and late William R Branch work in Angola was funded by the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project (National Geographic Society grant number EC0715-15), material was exported under the following expert permits 31/GGPCC/2016, 89/INBAC.MINAMB/2017 and 002/GGPTBOK/18, additional fieldwork assistance were provided by Chad Keates, Ninda Baptista, Kerlen Costa, James Harvey, Goetz Neef, Pedro Vaz Pinto and Alexander Rebelo. WC thanks Chad Keates for generating additional sequences, which was funded by the Wild Bird Trust National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project.