A decade after tour guide Basil P. Das stumbled upon a small black-and-beige snake while working on his coffee farm in southern India, researchers have described it as a new-to-science species. They’ve named it Rhinophis siruvaniensis, the species name referring to the Siruvani Hills, the only place the snake is currently known from, according to a recent study, Mongabay India contributor Vandana K. reports. The hills lie in the Western Ghats, at the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu states. “When I learnt it’s a new species, I was very happy because now I am a part of its history,” Das said. While R. siruvaniensis is new to the scientific literature, it isn’t new to local cardamom and coffee farmers who have long known of its behavior and seasonal patterns. “When I told my neighbors that I had found this new snake, they told me they had seen it many times before,” Das told Vandana. Rhinophis siruvaniensis was recently described in a paper based on specimens first collected by a tour guide 10 years ago on a coffee farm in India. Image courtesy of Umesh P.K. The newly described snake belongs to a group of nonvenomous snakes called shieldtail snakes, which burrow and live underground. About 20 species of Rhinophis shieldtails are found in Sri Lanka, while six species are known from India so far. Vivek Philip Cyriac, study co-author and a herpetologist who has been researching shieldtails for more than a decade, told Mongabay India that shieldtail snakes aren’t…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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