A wide-eyed snake has made scientists do a double take. The Hispaniolan vineboa, with its large protruding eyes and square snout, is the first boa species to be discovered in the Dominican Republic in more than a century.
Naturalist Miguel Landestoy of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and colleagues discovered the snake, Chilabothrus ampelophis, slithering in a patch of mountainous dry forest near the country’s southwestern border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. The last time researchers described a new boa species on the island was in 1888.
“The fact that an animal could have gone undetected for so long on this island that has a lot of people on it is pretty remarkable,” says R. Graham Reynolds, a herpetologist at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
Naturalist Miguel Landestoy of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and colleagues discovered the snake, Chilabothrus ampelophis, slithering in a patch of mountainous dry forest near the country’s southwestern border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. The last time researchers described a new boa species on the island was in 1888.
“The fact that an animal could have gone undetected for so long on this island that has a lot of people on it is pretty remarkable,” says R. Graham Reynolds, a herpetologist at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
