"When I was twelve years old and got my copy of REPTILES Magazine in the mail, and it had a picture of Slash holding his pet reticulated python on the cover, I thought, ‘This guy is so cool.’”
A new snake species from New Guinea has been named after Saul Hudson, also known as the guitarist Slash. The snake, Lielaphis slashi or Slash’s groundsnake, was discovered in 2006 Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. Austin was conducting field work in New Guinea when he happened upon the snake. It was unfamiliar to him, and in 2016, Austin teamed up with then doctorate student Sara Ruane and Tianqi Huang, whom, along with Austin, co-authored the study identifying the snake as a new species.
“Guns N’ Roses has been one of my favorite bands since I was in first grade, and by fifth grade, I had already told my teacher that I wanted to be a herpetologist– a scientist who studies reptiles– when I grew up,” Sara Ruane, the Field Museum’s Associate Curator of Herpetology and senior author of the paper in Zootaxa describing the new species said in a press release put out by The Field Museum. “So when I was 12 years old and got my copy of REPTILES Magazine in the mail, and it had a picture of Slash holding his pet reticulated python on the cover, I thought, ‘This guy is so cool.’”
The scientists studied the appearance of the snake and they were initially not certain that it was a new species, so they used genetic analysis to determined that it was indeed a new species.
“Using multiple cutting-edge genetic analyses, we found that L. slashi is genetically distinct from other similar snakes in the same genus,” said Huang, the study’s first author and a post-doctoral researcher at the Field Museum. “The combination of physical characteristics, like differences in numbers of scales when compared with other species, and the genetic evidence is what led us to realize that it is an entirely new species. We also used ecological modeling to show that L. slashi’s preferred habitat is different from similar snakes.”
“As a long-time herpephile, I am extremely honored and humbled to have Lielaphis slashi from New Guinea named after me. It is really exciting, I never would have imagined this moment would arrive,” Slash told The Field Museum.
An abstract of the study, A new species of Papuan groundsnake (Squamata: Colubridae: Lielaphis) from New Guinea, can be read on the Zootaxa website.
