Some Beautifully coloured Fan-Throated Lizards were remained unnoticed...!

One new genus and five new species of Fan-throated Lizards have been described from India.

The Fan-Throated Lizard (Sitana Ponticeriana) is a species of agamid lizard found in India, Sri Lanka, parts of Pakistan, and also from Bangladesh. The species is found mostly on the ground in open patches in thin forests.

After sampled 81 locations, covering 160,000 km² of in Peninsular India, the team of young zoologists V. Deepak, Varad Giri, Mohammad Asif, Shushil Kumar Dutta, Raju Vyas, Amod Zambre, Harshal Bhosale and Praveen Karanth noted down two known and five previously undescribed species. Among these five species, three belong to the genus Sitana, while two belong to a new genus named Sarada by V. Deepak.

During Displays, males of the genus Sitana bob their heads up-down, while those of Sarada shakes left-right. After the new discoveries of the team, there are 7 species of Fan-Throated Lizards from India.

For more information, you can go through the paper from the following link:

http://www.contributionstozoology.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ctz;idno=8501a04 

Meet a New Species of Snake from Gujarat...

Snakes are most interesting topic for most of the naturalists. We know about many species of snakes and also having our own thoughts for them. Today we are going to meet a newly described genus and species of an old world racer snake, recently described by well known herpetologists from Gujarat, India.

Recently a paper is published in the journal Plos One by Zeeshan Mirza, Raju Vyas, Harshil Patel, Rajesh Sanap and Jaydeep Mehta describing a new snake genus and species Wallace’s Striped Snake (Wallaceophis Gujaratensis) based on three specimens collected from Gujarat, India. The new genus is named after Russel Wallace for its pioneering work on biogeography and for co-discovering the theory of natural selection.

Colubrid snakes are one of the most species among serpents distributed across the world. Among coulubrids, racer and allied snakes have had immensely unstable state of taxonomy. Wallaceophis Gujaratensis is a member of old world racers. The snake is having distinct morphologically in having a unique dorsal scale reduction formula not reported from any known colubrid snake genus.

Congratulations to the whole team for their efforts and such a nice work.

For more details, refer the paper on following link:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148380