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:
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