SLSUN: At first glance, the young creature caught in a desert of eastern Africa might not have looked like much.
But the slightly iridescent animal turned out to be a new species. Jakob Hallermann and Oliver Hawlitschek decided to try to sort out a “common” yet often misidentified group of snakes known as African House snakes, they wrote in a study published Jan. 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa.
The new species of African house snake is known from only one specimen, a roughly 10-inch long juvenile snake caught “in high-altitude semiarid” part of Somaliland, the study said. It has a “cylindrical” body, “short” tail and pale stomach.
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