Nature's creations are abundant and it will be hard to imagine if human kind can discover and document them all.
A pleasant news struck me this morning. A team of researchers from UK and India has announced the discovery of a new snake in the Western Ghats recently.
Image source: Yahoo.com
The new snake has been named as Melanophidium Khairei’ Khaire’s Black Shieldtail after Neelimkumar Khaire, the emeritus founder of Katraj Snake Park in Pune and the Indian Hereptological Society.
The team included researchers from the Natural History Museum (NHM), London, UK; National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, India, the Indian Herpetological Society (IHS), Pune, India and the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). First author Dr David Gower and Dr Mark Wilkinson from NHM Ashok Captain of IHS/BNHS and Varad Giri a post doctoral fellow of NCBS constituted the team.
The discovery is the result of meticulous efforts of last 15 years by David Gower of NHM and his colleague Mark Wilkinson, Giri, Ashok- the Captain of Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai and Indian Herpetological Society, Pune.
According to researcher Varad Giri of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, the snake belongs to family Uropeltidae, which comprises all species which are burrowers and live mostly underground. It is said that this would be the first time that a new species has been correctly identified after a gap of 144 years.
The news comes barely a couple of days after another team of researchers discovered an entire genus of snake. The species has been named as Wallaceophis Gujaratenisis.
The snake genus has been named Wallaceophis in honour of the legendary 19th century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), considered the father of biogeography, while the snake species has been named Gujaratenisis to commemorate the western Indian state where it was discovered.
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